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Title: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Jan 19th, 2011, 3:43pm Regarding the WC tournament format. It's really a complex issue with various inter-related factors when you start thinking about it in detail. Here are my thoughts on the various factors and what format we should use next year. The WC tournament: 1. Should try to select the best player. The purpose of the tournament should be to select the best player (the one with the greatest skill in the game). It turns out that tournaments are not nearly as good at identifying the best player as a rating system based on high quality games. Tournament simulations have shown that crowning the player with the highest rating beats any other tournament format. The rating system inaccuracies have to get to about +-100 before this method gets worse than other formats. So we have to somewhat give up the notion that our tournaments are really selecting the best player. Not to belittle the achievement of the WC winner, but that just how it is. So why do we have a WC event and what can we say about the player who wins it. Well, we continue to have the WC event for the fun and excitement it brings to the community and the glory it brings to the players. We can say that the event selects the player who had the best performance during the event; it is not necessarily the player with the best skill in the game, but it is still quite an achievement. Then does the format of the tournament matter. Well realizing that the tournament will not be selecting the best player doesn't mean that we should give up trying and resort to just any format. We should still try to use a format that is good at selecting the best player. For a given number of players and other parameters like rating range and rating inaccuracy it not easy to find formats that are impartial to seeding and have a significantly better performance than other formats. It does seem to me that there are theoretical limits on the performance of formats that don't rely on seedings and these could probably be worked out mathematically in terms of the number of players in the tournament and the distribution of their true ratings. Maybe this would be a better way to characterize the different formats rather than the simulations. So the bottom line is that requiring the WC format to select the best player isn't as important a factor as I once thought it should be, but we shouldn't ignore it either. On an importance scale of 1 to 10 I would give it a 6. 2. Should finish in a tolerable amount of time. There seems to be a trade-off between the length of the tournament format in terms of the number of rounds and performance of the format in terms of selecting the best player. Longer formats will tend to be better at picking the best player. But this ability to pick the best player is also related to the rating difference between the best player and the average player in the tournament; and decreases rapidly as this difference decreases. In a series match between two players where the better player has a 65% chance of winning a game, the probability of the better player winning a 3 game series is 71.8%; and 7 game series is 80.0%. If the better player has a 55% chance of winning the game than the probability of the better player winning a 3 game series is 57.5%; and 7 games series is 60.8%. It requires a 69 game series to reach close to 80%. So in future years it would require longer and longer formats as the rating difference between the top player and the average of the field decreases. But how long of a format are we willing to tolerate. If the tournament takes too long it would have fewer people who could commit the time to participate. It would really be bad if a top player was not able to play because the tournament takes too long to finish. With the WC being completely online with one game per week, I think ideally about 10 weeks would be tolerable for most people. With me as the TC I'm willing to let it go beyond that to about 12 weeks. On an importance scale I would give this factor a 9 because if the tournament is too long we could lose top players. 3. Should allow a very large number of players to participate. Some believe that the significance of winning the WC increases based on the number of players that were participating in it. However, having a large number of players has other implications as well. The length of tournament formats increase with increasing number of players. The probability of selecting the best player decreases with increasing number of players. The number of games increases thereby increasing the chance of something going wrong and the TD or TC needing to intervene. So for practical reasons I have always wanted to limit the number of players in the WC to about 8 or 16 of the highest rated players willing to play. But is it possible that this is not large enough to include the best player. Perhaps the best player is the 20th one on the rating scale. Assuming that the best player has not sandbagged his rating and is willing to play is it possible that we might miss the player because we don't have enough slots. With close to 1000 players on the Arimaa WHR rating list the difference in rating between #1 and #16 is 430. So currently I think the chances of us missing the best player in the tournament is higher due to the player choosing not to play rather than not having enough slots. Out of curiosity I checked the FIDE top 100 list to see how things would be if we had as many rated Arimaa players as Chess. The rating difference between #1 and #32 is 100 points. 100 rating points translates to about 70% chances of winning for the better player. So it's highly likely that the best Chess player still willing to play is in the top 32 players. The significance of winning the WC I think should be based more on average rating of the players participating and not on how large a number of players participated. The main reason for allowing a large number of players is to make it an event that anyone can play in. This is quite possible when the pool of players is small, but it becomes harder to allow anyone to be able to play in the WC when the pool of players gets larger. In 2008 my kids were playing in the WC because we didn't have nearly as many strong players as we do now. Of course if we allow an unlimited number of players to play in the WC than anyone can play in it. But having a large number of players in the tournament comes with it's own set of problems. It is important that everyone should have an equal opportunity to be able to play in the WC, but literally allowing everyone to play in the actual tournament is not possible from a practical standpoint. Another reason for allowing a large number of player in the WC is because it provides players an opportunity to play serious event games (game where they were not able to chose the opponent) and build their WHR and WHRE ratings. This is primarily the reason why the current WC format is the way it is. The WC preliminary rounds are really another tournament which I used to call the Open Classic. The purpose of the Open Classic was to allow large numbers of players to take part in a serious tournament. The top 8 players from this tournament are the ones playing in the WC tournament. Thus, the WC tournament is limited entry, but rather than limit entry based on ratings we decided to limited entry based on performance in the Open Classic. So why not continue doing this. Because of two key developments since 2008 when we started this two tournament WC format. First we now have the tools to allow more tournament coordinators to run events; and we are starting to see more events happening during the year. Second we now have the WHR and WHRE rating systems that provides more reliable ratings. Thus, allowing the ability to limit the WC participants using these ratings. So the Open Classic tournament can still continue, but there is less need for it to be tied with the WC tournament. So on an importance scale I would say having a large number of participants in the WC tournament is a 1. 4. Should be fair. Everyone should be able to agree that the winner deserved the top spot based on performance in only this tournament. No one should be able to say they did not get a fair chance. No one should be able to say that other players cooperated to give one of the players an advantage. Ideally a tournament format should not allow collusion, should give all players a fair schedule and should not use any seeding. But in our desire to have the tournament select the best player we tend to bias the tournament so that the top seeded player has a higher chance of winning. When I think about why a tournament has seeding it is really only to improve the performance of the tournament format in selecting the best player. It is a mild form of crowning the highest rated player as the winner. If we give up the notion that the WC tournament selects the best player and accept that it just selects the player who had the best performance during the event then we should not be using seedings at all in an effort to make it a fair tournament for everyone. However, even if we don't use seedings, elimination type tournament formats will still end up causing some players to have a more difficult schedule than others; just by chance. The only way to avoid it is to have each player play against every other player. But this opens up the possibility of players cooperating to help each other. In fact whenever a player can lose a game and still stay in the tournament there is possibility of collusion. It is even worse if a player has no chance of winning the title, but is allowed to play players who do. Only a single elimination tournament minimizes collusion, but even there some forms of collusion are not preventable. But a single elimination also has the problem of every game being very critical and not giving any room for a bad day. So there is no free lunch; all formats will have some aspect that is not quite fair. Trying to find a perfectly fair tournament is perhaps impossible, but that doesn't mean fairness can be ignored because it is easy to construct formats that are blatantly unfair. So similar to trying to select the best player, trying to have the tournament be absolutely fair isn't as important as I once thought it should be, but it is not something that we should ignore either. So I also give this factor an importance of 6. 5. Should be fun and interesting for spectators to follow. If the format is simple and easy to understand it makes it much easier to follow the tournament. As the tournament progresses it should become more climatic with each round. Using time controls that keep the game moving at a steady pace is also an important consideration, but completely unrelated to the tournament format. But why even worry about whether or not the tournament is interesting to spectators. Some would say that the WC tournament should only address the needs of the players and we should not worry about the spectators. Since we don't have many spectators to begin with they would be right. But ignoring the needs of the spectators is also a good way to make sure we don't gain spectators. In the end having more spectators is good for the players. Knowing that people are watching makes them want to perform better and it encourages more top level players to want to participate. I like to set a precedence that regardless of how many spectators we actually have, we don't ignore the needs of the spectators. So for me this factor is quite important; I would weigh it in at 8. This year has given me a chance to see what a tournament with 32 players would be like. It is really quite a lot of games to deal with especially when they are mostly on the weekend. My weekends are quite occupied now with the WC games. If I ask the question do we really need that many players to be able to make sure we don't miss out on including players with potential to win the championship the answer is clearly no. As I mentioned earlier even with top 16 players we have a rating range of more than 400 points. So I think 16 players would be sufficient. Even if Arimaa has as many rated players as Chess I don't think we need to go to more than 32 players. When the rating range gets down to about 200 we can consider increasing the number of players. But for now I will stick with 16 players. So how will these 16 players be selected. It is possible to come up with all kinds of schemes, but I like the most simplest one. The 16 highest rated players on the WHR system who are willing to play will be able to enter the WC tournament. The purpose of the Swiss preliminary was to avoid using the gameroom ratings to select the 8 players who would be in the WC tournament. Since the gameroom ratings could easily be inflated by playing bots it was not a fair way to limit the entry in the WC. It would be good to continue having the Open Classic Swiss tournament each year where an unlimited number of players can participate, but I would rather that it not serve to determine who plays in the WC. Otherwise I have to make sure that the integrity of that tournament is as good as the WC tournament; that gets harder to do as more and more people are in the tournament. The WHR system is not perfect, but it much better than the gameroom ratings. One good thing about it is that it doesn't even require ongoing events for one to build their WHR ratings. One can simply challenge and play other human opponents to improve the ratings; even postal games against humans are included. Eventually when we do have more off season events going the WHRE ratings could be used. There is the possibility that after attaining a high rating a player does not play any games throughout the year but still gets to enter the WC. Until I see some adverse effects of this, I think I am OK with it. Toby Hudson in fact does this and it doesn't seem to be a problem. The floating elimination format has worked well in the past to provide a very climatic and fun to watch tournament. Simulations have shown that it is about as good as the round-robin in selecting the best player. With 16 players even a floating triple elimination can fit into 12 weeks. In terms of fairness it is good at minimizing the possibility of collusion while still giving some chances to players to recover from a bad game. The main sticking point in terms of fairness is the seeding. Since the players will not all have the same schedule some are bound to have a tougher schedule than others. So in the past we have decided that since the schedule is not going to be fair to everyone anyways, we might as well bias to favor the top seeded player thereby slightly increasing the performance of the format in selecting the best player. This is clearly not fair if you happen to be the lowest seeded player. But when ratings from high quality games are used for the seeding then it is fair. If everyone knows that a higher rating will get you better seeding in the WC tournament, they have all year long to try and improve their ratings. Even though it is easy to drop ones rating, it is much harder to increase it especially against human opponents and especially if the players did not have a choice in selecting their opponents. Working on improving your rating during the year becomes the preliminary to the WC. On the other hand it might not be all that bad to have the players draw a random number in each round to determine their seeding. The chances of the best player winning the tournament would decrease. But with higher chances of winning for everyone else it might interest more top players to play. It might also make the tournament more exciting to watch for the spectators. But with the pairings not being deterministic, it could lead to other issues of unfairness. To prevent this we might have to fix a seed for the random number generator used by the pairing program before the start of the tournament. Minor technicalities, but important considerations none the less. By a very slight margin I think I favor random seeding before each round over seeding by ratings. We have recently also discussed the possibility of allowing players who have been eliminated to continue playing against other players who have also been eliminated. This helps to provide more WC event experience to the eliminated players. I think this was a good idea suggested by Thomas Foy and if there is interest we should implement it. However, in the games database these games would be marked as WC side event games and not actual WC games. Also I don't think the players of these games can expect to have coverage. Actually even the players of WC games can't expect coverage of their games and so the expectation would be even less for the games in the eliminated bracket. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Jan 19th, 2011, 5:40pm Thank you for going into great detail on your thoughts on the format of the 2012 World Championship. I infer that you haven't made any final decision, and that everything is still open to further discussion. After reading your presentation, I think the most important change to make to the format, starting immediately, is to reduce your work load. In particular, you should not be doing things that can be done by other people. You should not give any live commentary, and you should not be responsible for capturing/reformatting/uploading the audio (even though I was pressuring you to do the latter). I will henceforth capture and re-encode my own commentary if I can't find another volunteer, because the worst thing that can happen to the Arimaa community is for you to burn out. You need to conserve your energy for technical difficulties like the JS client not working (see site discussion thread), the pairing software not behaving as expected, rescheduling games upon consent of both players, etc., because presently nobody else can do those things. I know how exhausting it is to give commentary, so I was stunned at how many games you commentated during round two on top of everything else you were handling. Why did you prioritize this? Perhaps it is because the live commentary is such a great community builder. People hang around the site more if they have the radio to listen to, and they chat more. It helps build up Arimaa as a spectator sport, which is a goal that I know both you and I set as a high priority. It turns out, however, that I sharply disagree with you in at least one respect of building the spectator base for Arimaa. I believe that the only people who will ever watch Arimaa games are Arimaa players. It is simply not a sport such as, say, gymnastics, which one can enjoy as a spectator without ever having been a player. I can barely do a somersault myself, but I can tell whether the gymnast did a single flip or a double with a half twist. I can be amazed by the physical feats of gymnasts despite my near ignorance of the sport. Arimaa, by contrast, can't be enjoyed by people who don't know what is going on. Yes, one's understanding (and hence enjoyment) of Arimaa can be enhanced by live commentary, but the enjoyment can't be created out of thin air. Fantastic moves aren't going to be breathtaking to people who didn't grasp the tension in the position before the move was made. For example, I found your move 17g against Adanac thrilling, but is was a thrill that a non-Arimaa player simply cannot experience even if a commentator is saying, "Be thrilled now." After all, it was just a horse sideways four steps with no goal or goal threat, no capture or capture threat, and not even a push or pull. I know you dream of non-players watching Arimaa with enjoyment, but I think you are harboring an illusion on that score. Directing a lot of energy toward an illusory goal saps energy from achieving what can in fact be achieved. The achievable goal that will increase the number of Arimaa spectators is to increase the number of Arimaa players. If there is someday money and sponsorship for Arimaa the way there is for chess today, then it will come from the players themselves. This is the case for chess right now; it is the huge base of chess players that ultimately supports large prize funds. You imagine that future Arimaa support will come from spectators, and so do I, but the difference is that I am sure the spectators will be almost exclusively players. This difference between us is why I fundamentally disagree with your wanting to make the World Championship an invitational event rather than an open event. The richest source of spectators who are paying attention this year, but wouldn't be paying attention if you limited the field to 16 players, are the 17-32 seeds. There are even a few of the lower seeds who are relatively new to Arimaa. By having the World Championship be an open tournament every year, we are directly building the player base and spectator base. Indirectly, too, the more people who are playing in the tournament, the more friends and family of those people will hear about Arimaa, and perhaps give it a try themselves. You say that limiting the tournament to the top 16 by rating is sufficient for determining the best player in the world, and I agree with that. But if determining the best player in the world is only a 6 on your scale, and having a great spectator event is an 8, then limiting the participation is counter-productive to your own goals. Why would we tell people who want to participate that they can't participate, when allowing open participation is the easiest way to engage and activate the fan base? You give two arguments against an open field: that is makes the tournament too long and that it is too much work. I'm not very sympathetic to the first argument. I estimated before that the length of an elimination tournament is C + lg(N) + lg(lg(N)), where C is a constant and N is the number of players, so doubling the tournament size from 32 to 64 adds only one and a quarter rounds. If we could actually get that many players (and double the prize donations -- how's that for spectator support?) it would be well worth the additional length. Would I accept and eighteen-round triple-elimination if we could get a thousand players signed up for it? You bet I would! For a piece of a ten-thousand-dollar prize pool, I would gladly play one serious game of Arimaa every week for four months with no breaks. I am much more sympathetic to your argument that a larger tournament is more work for you. However, if you offload the responsibility of commentary (where your efforts don't scale at all) and incrementally improve the tournament automation as the player base increases, then your work load shouldn't grow at all. Critically, we members of the community must help you run the tournament in whatever capacity can be arranged. I think the volunteers stand ready and able to take over various functions and keep your workload manageable. In short, I rate the open format of the World Championships a 10 on the importance scale, and I think you would be making a huge mistake to change it. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by 722caasi on Jan 19th, 2011, 8:16pm As one of those "17-32 seeds", (28 :)) I would like to make a few comments. 1. It seems intuitively possible that the tournament could both have an arbitrary number of people and have limited length for most of the players by giving the higher rated players initial byes. Then, the lower seeds' average playing time could be limited by having an elimination process. The only people who would have to play the whole tournament would be low seeds who did well, and those people would probably e willing to go on. (I know I would!) Alternatively, players who did not want to play the whole tournament could be given byes on specific weeks at their request, with byes counting as draws. The point is, there is not a clear trade-off between number of players and length of the tournament. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by aaaa on Jan 19th, 2011, 8:19pm OK, here's a draft of my proposed tournament structure for the human championship: Tournament is open to all. Everyone plays until they have lost three times. At the end of each round, any player who has lost for the third time is eliminated. Before each round, each remaining player gets (re-)ranked by highest performance rating (per the Bradley-Terry model) calculated over all non-forfeited games played in the tournament so far, adding for each player, a half-weighted dummy draw (i.e. a prior of .25 wins out of .5 games) against a virtual player having the corresponding WHR rating fixed before the tournament. Ties are broken randomly. Pairing rules (each strictly overruling the next, with forfeits treated as normal losses and each double forfeit as a loss for both players):
Color assignment as usual. Consolation playoff games as usual (will the increase of number of lives cause any problems here?). If there are more than 8 players left in the tournament, then the time control of a game is 60s/5m/100/0/4h/4m, otherwise it's 90s/5m/100/0/6h/5m (notice the full banking of time; perhaps to compensate, the starting reserves could be lowered). |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Nombril on Jan 19th, 2011, 9:27pm Thanks for starting a separate thread on this. I'd like to point out a couple of things for consideration: Use of Ratings: I agree the WHR is much more accurate than the gameroom rating, but I don't think it should be used as the sole selector for the WC participation, or even to determine the 'best' Arimaa player. Some reasons: A. My rating at Postal speeds 400 points higher than my overall WHR rating. Should I quit playing live games to help my WHR? B. I'm terrible at Blitz speed. Should I quit playing games at faster times? (Going to WHRE doesn't change this - we had a number of Blitz speed events during the year.) C. The results of playing casual games becomes more "important" and less "fun". Playing during the year to improve my seed in the Open Classic is one thing, but if I'm playing just to make the cut for the WC it becomes more like work. I guess I've felt that ratings are a good way to find a roughly equal opponent to have a good game. Making them more important would make it more difficult to test new openings, explore different strategies, play hanzack, etc. etc. Linking the Open Classic to the WC: It feels like the 'prize' of qualifying for the WC is part of the draw for participation in the Open Classic. I agree with Fritz that more participation leads to more interest/involvement/spectators/excitement/etc. Instead of a unified tournament (triple elimination), here is a suggestion to modify the current WC selection: Reserve some portion of the spots as invitation only to the top rated players, and also have some open spots for the top finishers in the Open Classic. This would address your 2nd point and allow any top players that can't commit to 3 months of weekly games a chance to opt out of the Open Classic and just play the WC. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Sconibulus on Jan 19th, 2011, 9:34pm I like that idea Nombril, It doesn't force people to pay attention to their rating to get a slot, but it also doesn't force people to play a qualifier if they're clearly good enough to make the tournament. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by ginrunner on Jan 19th, 2011, 11:58pm I really like Nombril's idea about having reserved spots for the highest rated players and having open spots to those that do well in tournaments. Also, I think Fritz is spot on with his statement that cutting the tournament down would kill some of the attention, specifically from the people who would just be outside of the cut. Personally I am on the site now every day looking at who my opponent is, reviewing some of their old games for traits, and reviewing my games as well. I know that I am not one of the top players in the tournament this year but since the start this year I can already see where I am lacking in certain areas and am improving much faster than I would be if it were something I was not directly involved with. Maybe next year people will swear under their breath when they see they are paired vs me but I doubt this year that is the case. Allowing an open high level tournament like the WC boosts the community enjoyment and involvement immensely. I suggest keeping an open tournament with a high intrinsic reward (my goal for this year was making the top 8 as well as getting some high level games in). If you are looking for some way of cutting down people may I suggest making it a prerequisite to climb the entire bot ladder (not the full one of course). I honestly thought it already was a prerequisite until I saw some of the entries and realized it wasn't. This would allow only people who would be able to defend the human's title in the Arimaa Challenge to compete in a tournament designed to find those people to who should defend the title in the first place. My 2 cents on the matter |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Jan 20th, 2011, 12:15pm Thanks for the feedback everyone. Karl, I think sensational players and great commentators is what attracts non-player spectators. I do agree that having more players would also help us gain more spectators. But, I think we differ on what we should do to gain more players. I think having more tournaments especially ones limited to intermediate and beginner level players throughout the year would help us gain more players. Making a once a year event intended for the advanced players even bigger by allowing anyone to play just doesn't seem like the right approach to me anymore. It's overloading one tournament with the needs of too many players. Having more tournaments intended for different skill levels would be the right way to go. It would give many more people a taste of what it's like to win a tournament. I really appreciate the help you have offered. You already do so much for the Arimaa community I can't see myself asking you to do more. I know you are volunteering, but when the tournament started you were doubtful about how much you would be able to participate this year with your courses going on. I would hate to see you get overloaded and withdraw from Arimaa. What I would really like to see is more people stepping forward to organize more events, as well as volunteering to be tournament coordinators and tournament directors. I really think that because Joel organized the AWL and AOF this past summer it helped to increase the number or active players and thus the participation in the WC this year. Part of the difficulty of having a tournament with many games is making sure every game gets scheduled as the players desired, making sure each game gets played without any technical problems and being available to resolve problems if something should go wrong. The more games there are the higher the chances of things going wrong. With 16 games I am already hitting my practical limits. Since the ability to run the WC is now all web based, I am open to allowing someone else be the tournament coordinator. Perhaps they would be willing to handle tournaments with larger number of players and longer schedules. Also I think it is important to mention that this format is not an invitational or closed to anyone. In fact it is more open than what we currently have. The preliminary is open to everyone and there is no registration fee to participate in the preliminary; just play whenever you want and work on improving your WHR rating; you have all year long to be able to do this; and you can play as many or few games as necessary. Currently there is a fee to participate in the preliminary. Way more people could participate in this format than what any preliminary tournament would be able to handle. This preliminary doesn't put a burden on anyone unlike actually conducting a preliminary tournament. Only the top 16 players from the preliminary move on to the finals. This may sound limiting or invitational, but compare it to our current situation of only the top 8 from a tournament moving on to the finals. Much less chances that we lose the best player going from preliminary to finals. Also even if you are #20 on the rating scale you might still have a good chance of going to the WC finals since some of the players who qualified may not be able to. Then the finals is a triple elimination instead of double elimination; further improving the chances that the best player will win the tournament. This format is certainly not excluding someone who wants to participate from having an equal chance at winning the WC. I guess what it doesn't provide is the physiological feeling of having participated in the WC if you tried your best to improve your rating, but did not make it to the finals. Eric, linking the Open Classic to the WC is what we already have. In fact it is 100% linked right now. We are trying to get away from having any other tournament directly linked to the WC (even partially) because it will require that tournament to be conducted to the standard of the WC and even then there will not be an end to discussions of what that tournament format should be, how fair it is, how many players from that tournament should get slots in the WC, etc. I agree even the WHR ratings are not the best measure of ones ability to play well in the WC, but I would guess that no preliminary tournament will be able to do better than that anyways. We still have room to make the rating system an even better measure in the future by separating postal and live games as well as using event games. I think we should at least try out the simple and straightforward method of using ratings. aaaa, I think allocating the bye before trying to find the best pairing was simplifying the algorithm. Wouldn't swapping that make it take longer to run? Also can you discuss the advantages of doing the seeding this way. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Sconibulus on Jan 20th, 2011, 12:56pm Omar, the main problem I have with using ratings, and only ratings to decide who can play in the tournament is that it will strongly disincentivize "bubble" players from playing games they think they have a good chance of losing, especially against other "bubble" players. Do we really want to do that? Even if we used WHRE, it would give a bit of a bonus to sandbagging gameroom ratings by 1-200 points and signing up for a lot of Autopostal games to get a large number of players slightly worse than you as event game opponents. I'm not saying that ratings can't be used at all, it does make sense to pull the top rated players out so they don't have to fight their way in every year, but a reasonable number of players should have the opportunity to play in as well, maybe not from one large tournament if that's too intensive, but perhaps podium finishers from some number of less-intensive tournaments throughout the year. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Nombril on Jan 20th, 2011, 2:24pm Yes, I understand we currently have a 100% link between the Open Classic and WC. I suggested the hybrid to get the best of both worlds. There would be the option to skip straight to the WC for the top players that aren't interested in the longer Open Classic. Then the Open Classic would help deterimine the final slots for those "bubble" players that probably shouldn't be sorted strictly by a rating system. You are concerned about never ending discussions for how many slots to allocate between 'ratings' and 'tournament' players, but I could see similar arguments about ratings. If we keep Postal games out, should we also keep out 15s games? What about 30s games? Do we have enough event games to use WHRE? Etc. By using two qualifying mechanisms, it seems it would be easier to ignore the inherent disadvantages that will always be present in each method, and it becomes far less important for either to be 'perfect'. You also talk about improving your ratings through out the year as the new "preliminary". I'm sorry, but I just can't imagine that playing more casual games will generate the same interest and excitement as compared to the large Open Classic. I also just noticed that aaaa's suggested format is open to everyone. Were you still planning on limiting the WC to 16 players? |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Jan 20th, 2011, 8:28pm on 01/20/11 at 12:15:56, omar wrote:
You are portraying the rating system as an ongoing tournament, but this is a very weak analogy. In a tournament the players do not get to select their opponents and their time controls. In a tournament no one can protect his standing by refusing to play. Heck, if we could do that, I would take a pass this round instead of playing hanzack. The WHR ratings, although they don't include bots, are extremely open to abuse and manipulation. It would be trivial to cheat outright. For example, just before the World Championship begins, the #18 player could realize he needs a few more points, and persuade his friends to lose to him on purpose. Or he could create sockpuppet accounts, get those up to a high level, and then get his friends to use those sockpuppet accounts to lose to his main account. If you think that the current tournament format is too much work, think about how much work it would be to try to police everyone's rating to prevent ratings abuse. But even if constant policing of the ratings managed to prevent outright cheating, a general focus on keeping one's rating as high as possible would be pernicious to the Arimaa community. You imply that people who are trying to get a high rating will play lots of games, but this is simply not true; the key to an inflated rating is avoiding bad pairings. Nombril has already pointed out the time control issue; I too have a far better record postally than in live games, thus to keep my rating high I should play only postally. Furthermore, I have a relatively poor record against PMertens, so I should avoid playing him. Adanac has a poor record against me, so he should avoid playing me, etc. There will probably be some people who don't try to inflate their rating via opponent selection and time-control selection. They will play anyone at any speed, for fun, and not care that it lowers their rating. But if I care about my own rating, I must avoid playing those happy-go-lucky people at all costs. On average, playing against someone who is underrated will drag my own rating down. I will only gain on average by playing against overrated opponents. People who are drastically underrated could become pariahs. For example, why would anyone in his right mind play against hanzack? If the top sixteen players all needed to preserve their high ratings in order to qualify for the World Championship, then logically all sixteen should refuse to play against him. Indeed, everyone in the top sixteen would have a disincentive to play against anyone outside the top sixteen. In what sense is a tournament "open" if the top players can implicitly band together to keep another player out by avoiding him? Setting aside the issue of cheating, it would reduce the number of rated HvH games if everyone played to maximize his WHR rating. There is no pairing that will, on average, help both player increase their ratings. There is no bonus for playing many games, but there is a bonus for avoiding disadvantageous pairings. Always one player has more to lose than to gain, on average. It takes two to tango, but one of the two will always (correctly) see that it would be better for his rating if he refused the game. We have discussed ratings at length before, Omar, and I'll bet that I can find a quote from you agreeing to this fact: The only way to ensure accurate ratings is to prevent people from choosing their opponents. In a tournament, you don't get to choose your opponents, but in every other circumstance you do get to choose. This is what makes ratings a very poor substitute for a preliminary tournament. Quote:
I understand the danger in overloading a tournament with too many goals, because one goal can suffer when trying to meet another. But the needs of the top players do not suffer from allowing lots of lower-rated players to register. Well, OK, I admit that in 2008 the large field slightly undermined the tournament atmosphere, but that was because you allowed kids to register without paying an entry fee to show commitment. A non-refundable entry fee that contributes to the prize money solves that problem. This year's tournament atmosphere has been the best ever despite the large field. The fact that so many people have signed up in this year has swelled the prize fund that I expect to win part of. Katie is my witness: at the beginning of this year's tournament I said that I would have worked harder to prepare if I had known the prize fund would be so large. One extra round of tournament time is a small disincentive compared to the extra incentive of double prize money. Like you, I think it would be great to have more tournaments offered during the whole year. But who is going to come to those events? The Arimaa World Championship format is obviously motivating people to participate. We had thirteen players under 1800 who decided to register this year. Just as an experiment, I want you to announce an under-1800 Arimaa tournament with a $10 entry fee some time before the next World Championship and see whether you get more or fewer than thirteen people to sign up. By your theory, a beginner tournament will better meet the needs of beginners, and all the prospective players will have a chance of winning, so more people should flock to that tournament. My theory is that people want to play in the World Championship because it is the World Championship. Do you know how many players spend $10,000 to enter the World Series of Poker, even though they have no realistic chance of winning? They drop that $10,000 precisely because it is the World Series of Poker and not some lesser event. I'm trying to imagine the WSOP organizers saying: "This tournament has just gotten too big. We're not going to take your money and let you play unless you are in the top hundred in the world." No, the WSOP is way too savvy for that. Instead they have increased the length of the event year by year, and split it out between multiple venues, and tackled every other logistical challenge because they realize it is in their best interest to have their event get bigger every year. The thirty-three entrants to this year's Arimaa World Championship was a wonderful occurrence. Run with it. Figure out what we need to do to keep the momentum and make it feasible to hold an even bigger event next year, should we be so fortunate. Yes, let's offer other events all year to try to cater to the needs of all players, but if players by their own volition think that the World Championship serves their needs, certainly don't bar the door to them. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Jan 20th, 2011, 10:58pm on 01/20/11 at 12:15:56, omar wrote:
It think it is a great idea for you to offload as much of the work load as you can. If the World Championship can now be scheduled by someone else via your tournament tool, then someone else should do it. If the scheduling e-mails can be sent out by someone else, then they should be. I would be willing to take on that role myself, and I don't think I am the only one who would be willing. (Maybe it would best be someone who is not in contention for the title, to avoid conflict of interest, but even so better me than you.) Of course your work load during the World Championship would remain high. There are always an infinite number of things that only you can do, such as restart a game that was interrupted by server problems. But once you have developed a tool to automate a task, that task should pass on to the community. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by ginrunner on Jan 20th, 2011, 11:40pm I can almost guarantee that a beginner only tournament with an entry fee would flop. having many free and fun tournaments during the year would be a great idea and I am also positive that players would be willing to run these small tournaments. For example, while my tag team seemed to be a flop if it had been met with more approval I would have been willing to run the entire thing. Other members have written in the wiki and done things like that, those players would have no problems running a small event on their own. The allure to the small tournaments is "I won the so and so tournament." That would boost the enjoyment of the community more than having multiple entry fee events I think. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by aaaa on Jan 21st, 2011, 11:56am on 01/20/11 at 12:15:56, omar wrote:
The matching algorithm simply expects numbers signifying the desirability of each pairing, while the assigning of byes can be determined by the use of a virtual player. The hierarchy of priorities with respect to the pairing rules can be respected by the use of appropriate weights. The fact that it's only the pairing rule with the lowest priority that allows for a considerable variety of scores, should mean that the weights that are calculated by this approach should remain manageable and that there should be little risk of overflow. Janzert has already succeeded in creating an implementation and I should follow shortly with one following above draft. Quote:
It was Fritzlein who pointed out that having a good seed that remains fixed for the entire tournament would be an enduring advantage, especially as the number of lives increase, since that means more opportunities for the lowest pairing rule to make a difference. Such a thing may be currently justifiable with the several rounds of the Swiss preliminary determining the seed, but not when having a triple elimination tournament from the start. I would also like to point out that, given your desire of not having too many participants, you should actually welcome such a cutthroat tournament format, as it should discourage too weak players from signing up and that without throwing up any artificial barriers. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Jan 21st, 2011, 5:37pm Karl, I agree that even WHR can be abused and yes I've been saying we eventually want to move to WHRE and possibly even split the ratings into postal, regular and fast. But, I just don't think that somebody who doesn't already have a high rating will abuse the system so much just to be able to get into the WC. They are just going to end up paying a registration fee with have much chance to win anything. Even if there is abuse, it won't effect the top players and I'm sure the best player would not be lost by this filter. In Poker I would think that people who are putting up such money really do think they have a chance to win and are not doing it just to say they played in the World Series. With Poker having a bit of luck everyone does have more equal chances than in a pure skill game like Arimaa. Also they keep expanding because they are doing it for profit. We can't compare that to our situation. Quote:
We still have a lot of time before the 2012 WC, so maybe we can figure something out before that. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Jan 21st, 2011, 5:47pm aaaa, I saw the explanation you gave of the advantages in the other thread. I'd like to see the simulation results from this. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by aaaa on Jan 26th, 2011, 6:21pm I now realize that the influence of seeding can be further decreased by only having the initial seeds serve as a tiebreaker after calculating the performance ratings using equal priors. This will also have the advantage that one would only need a relative ordering and no absolute ratings, allowing the scheduling algorithm to be used for the computer championship as well (if the bots will continue to be seeded in advance). |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Hippo on Jan 27th, 2011, 9:33am I also dislike the WHR filtering. On previous year I have played 1 HvH normal speed game before the turnament started (with Tuks who was disconnected). I have finished 2 autopostals till that (one started on GMR around 1300 the other around 1600). The participation on WC was big opportunity for me. I have played several funny matches with PMertens losing a lot of rating points to him during the WC period and then I played HvH only occasionally. I have played postals on mixer, autopostal and causal. I had time on my trip to play the blitz/fast turnament, but I had such bad connection that I lost with Trevor game which could not be lost with good connection. Actually there was lack of players there so not playing would be worse for the comunity ... I don't care the loss, it was fun, but it wouldn't be in the case of WHR filtering. I still have very few HvH matches played and each one has big influence on my WHR. I am not sure how much WHR changed, but as I read it long time ago, the player was considered to have a fixed rating (old games were as important as the new ones) ... if that remains, players would be encouradged not to play HvH till they got high skill level and start after that ... Is it really the incentive we want to create? Or may be to create duplicate accounts whenever the skills jump up such that the historical WHR pulls you down too much? In case of duplicate accounts one could use one for causal games the other for building his position ... I have looked at my statistics now ... I have played 18 rated HvH games in 1 minute per move. 7 of them were highly important. 4 were training games where I didn't care the final result 6 were just causal games and losing in one game was almost planned. (The highly important games were AWL game and the WC games not ending on disconnection). Games played during WC period are mostly to train some special kind of the game ... |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by aaaa on Feb 17th, 2011, 4:38pm I have come to the conclusion that ignoring one-sided forfeits for the purpose of recalculating seeds gives too much of an incentive for a weaker player in a lopsided match not to show up in order to improve his or her seeding in the next round. For example, if exactly one player were to forfeit in the first round, then in the next round, that player would always become the best-seeded player amongst those with a loss. I now propose that one-sided forfeits are handled completely identical to a regular loss by the tournament rules (except for the required appeal for continuing one's participation). For the purpose of calculating performance ratings, doubly forfeited games would still continue to be treated as not having taken place at all (while otherwise still being registered as a loss for both players of course). |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by aaaa on Feb 24th, 2011, 7:35pm on 01/19/11 at 20:19:44, aaaa wrote:
By running simulations of floating triple elimination tournaments, I have been able to determine that, of the losers, as many as 5 players can share the most number of wins, and in case it's only one player, as many as 6 players can have the second-most number of wins. Omar, how many rounds of playoff games would you be willing to accept? Of course, you could also just abolish playoff games altogether and allow multiple players to share second and third place. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Feb 25th, 2011, 7:45pm on 02/24/11 at 19:35:15, aaaa wrote:
Thanks for looking into this aaaa. I'm just wondering how many players were in tournament. Basically you are saying that the second place could potentially have 5 players and 3rd place could potentially have 6 players. Wow, it would extend the tournament several more rounds to break these ties. I think I might opt to just allow multiple players win second and third place and split the prizes. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by aaaa on Feb 28th, 2011, 3:43pm on 02/25/11 at 19:45:44, omar wrote:
I had these many ties for second and third place occur with simulated tournaments starting out with as few as 11 and 19 players, respectively. Quote:
That would seem particularly appropriate given that everyone starts out with 3 lives. I say this, because, if I'm not mistaken, the number of lives should correspond to how many players will be strictly ranked at the top if each of them would always beat anyone weaker. In other words, if a top 3 of players were to manifest itself perfectly, then this should likewise be reflected in the final standings, and that without having any playoff games. On a different subject, given that the championship is to become a ruthless tournament to determine the best player, the whole idea of changing time control settings mid-tournament doesn't seem to make sense in the first place. I assume then, that it's going to be 90 seconds per move throughout the entire championship? Also, I think it's worth noting that having surplus time be completely banked could be construed as actually being a compromise position in light of some even wanting the possibility of using up the entire reserve regardless of total turn time. If one were to accept such a spectrum of positions, then it follows that, at minimum, the idea of partial banking is being overwhelmingly rejected here. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Mar 2nd, 2011, 12:04pm I think one of the reasons for using a faster time control in the preliminaries was to allow more people to be able to participate. So if we limit the number of people in the WC championship then I think it would be best to have the same time control throughout the event. If we want to allow more people to participate then using a faster time control in the earlier rounds would be better. We also should standardize on some simple time controls and start using these on the site and in events games. To simplify the time controls I suppose we could always have 100% of unused time added to reserve and no limit on building the reserve. That eliminates needing to specify two of the six parameters. If the initial reserve, max time per turn and total game time are specified in terms of the time per move then we only have one parameter that needs to be specified. We kind of already have names for various speed games based on time per move; like Blitz=15 sec/move, Fast=30 sec/move, etc. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Mar 2nd, 2011, 12:39pm Here are the most common time controls that we currently use. These are for non-postal game where one of the players is a human. Code:
Here it is for event games: Code:
For faster games it seems we want the initial reserve to be a much higher multiple of time per move than for slower games. So it might be hard to have one multiple fit all cases, but maybe something like this will do: initial reserve (R) = 4 x time per move (M) max turn time (T) = 4 x time per move (M) max game time (G) = 240 x time per move (M) So for a 15 second per move (Blitz) game this would be: 15s/1m/100/0/1h/1m For a 30 second per move (Fast) game this would be: 30s/2m/100/0/2h/2m For a 60 second per move game this would be: 1m/4m/100/0/4h/4m For a 90 second per move game this would be: 1m30s/6m/100/0/6h/6m For a 2 minute per move game this would be: 2m/8m/100/0/8h/8m |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Janzert on Mar 2nd, 2011, 12:58pm I think one of the great things about Arimaa is its very powerful and flexible time control system. I certainly understand why we want a few standard, named controls (e.g. blitz, fast, etc.) but I think essentially restricting the time control system to a much less flexible set is a detriment not a benefit. I would much rather when a player creates a game, in addition to a drop down with the standard controls they also be allowed to enter any arbitrary control. Janzert |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Mar 2nd, 2011, 1:15pm I'm not proposing that we reduce the Arimaa time control system to a simplified one. No, the current flexible system would still be there. The ability to enter your own time control has been on my todo list for awhile. Although this is a neat feature for power users, I don't think this is something that would commonly be used or is critical needed to improve the site, so I never get around to it. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Mar 2nd, 2011, 5:12pm I agree with both Janzert and Omar. It's nice to have all the parameters to play with, but in practice people respond well to things that have a few, easy, prominent choices. Think of the one-button I-pod. So we should decide on behalf of users which standard time controls are best and offer only those rather than the huge list we have now. Also I would like a single option to enter an arbitrary time control. I think 45s/move should remain a standard option, leaving six standard choices instead of five. Also, let me point out that reducing the number of standard choices doesn't force us to bank 100% of the unused time in every case. We could instead choose to bank 75% of the unused time in every case. Either way there would just be six standard time controls. Recall the case for partial banking of unused time: it rewards thinking for approximately the same time on every move relative to blitzing some moves and thinking a long time on others. What is one of the most annoying things for spectators of chess games? The uneven pace of moves. Maybe the opening twenty moves are played in ten minutes and then the next move by itself takes twenty minutes. And then after dragging their heels throughout the middlegame, the players often have a time scramble to make it to forty moves and get more time. Then the game screeches to a halt and the spectators have another long wait while the players try to sort out what just happened. By all means, let's have a uniform standard for simplicity, but let it be uniform in a spectator-friendly way. The main argument in favor of banking 100% of unused time is that people are used to it. Anything new and different can upset people. And certainly it is new and unusual to organize a board game partially for the convenience of the spectators rather than entirely for the convenience of the players. And even in terms of the convenience of the players, is banking 75% a burden? It requires only an adjustment towards a steady move pace, namely thinking a little longer on the reflex moves and moving a little faster on the analysis paralysis moves. Keep that in the back of your head, and that's it. It's not like the players are required to compute for themselves how many seconds of reserve they are gaining/losing at any given time. We've been banking 75% reserve throughout this World Championship and the previous, without it causing any problems. If it really made the players uncomfortable, you can be sure they would be squawking. On the upside, spectator enjoyment of games has been taking off like wildfire. Let's keep a good thing going. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by mistre on Mar 4th, 2011, 7:47am I agree that a simplified time control system would make the site more user friendly. I also agree with Fritzlein that we should keep the 45s option. If you count just human-human non-event games, you will find it is a popular option. I am a little concerned about the banking of only 75% and shorter initial reserve times in fast and blitz games. I think these changes could potentially cause some inflation in those bot ratings due to even more increased time pressure. However, for games of 45s or longer, I am in favor of the proposed changes. We should also look at reducing the number of postal options. It appears that 95%+ of postal games are on the 1d/60d/100/0/300d/21d setting anyways. I actually prefer the 14d reserve, but most players don't like it, so I stopped using it. Maybe a 30d reserve option? Lastly, this time control topic should be moved to a new thread as it has gotten off track from talking about the original subject. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Mar 4th, 2011, 9:31am I guess blitz and fast games are not very conducive to spectators anyway. Maybe there could be a standard breakpoint; games at 60s/move and longer bank 75% of unused time, while games at 45s/move and faster bank 100% of unused time. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by rbarreira on Mar 4th, 2011, 9:43am Since bot ratings were mentioned, I should say that I expect at least some of the bots to not be ready for 75% reserve accumulation (I know mine isn't). So if that becomes the standard for human games it will feel different when playing bots. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Hippo on Mar 4th, 2011, 9:57am on 03/02/11 at 12:39:53, omar wrote:
I would prefere T/1m+3T/75/0/240T/1m+3T (I don't remember what 0 means and I never reached the game time so I am not sure with 240T .. may be 180T + 30m?) I understand Fritzlein reasoning and I am avare of initial time reserve and short maximal time in lightning/blitz/fast games. This would help with it. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Mar 4th, 2011, 11:54am Quote:
Yes, I was just giving some examples; didn't mean that those would be the only ones. I should have included 45s as an example too since it is very popular. Quote:
Having a maximum turn time is the key to making the time controls spectator friendly. It guarantees that a spectator will never have to wait longer than this time to see the next move regardless of how much time the player has built up. Quote:
Yes, it's what people seem to expect. Banking a fractional amount seems non-intuitive; especially for people coming from other games; no other game does this but Arimaa. I think the need for banking fractional reserve is less when the maximum turn time parameter is set. Quote:
Yes, I was also starting to think that the faster games needed more initial reserve and that slower games don't need as much. Quote:
Yes, there are a lot of postal time controls that don't get used much. We can standardize these also once we are done with the interactive ones. Quote:
It's hard to keep threads on track :-) Maybe the best way to handle this is to have an area in the wiki with RFC type pages that describe the standard and as reference links back to the relevant forum threads. Quote:
Bots won't have any problems with fractional reserves. The server takes care of determining the new reserve values and sends them to the bot. Quote:
Good solution for providing more initial reserve for fast games and less for slower games. I might propose: M/2m+2M/100/0/240M/2m+2M It gives a bit more initial reserve in faster games and less in slower games. This will make the Blitz bots feel closer to how they were before we stopped adding the setup time to reserve. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Hippo on Mar 4th, 2011, 12:10pm on 03/04/11 at 11:54:41, omar wrote:
That would be OK for me :) |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Mar 4th, 2011, 12:26pm I just ran some examples using: M/2m+2M/100/0/240M/2m+2M and it makes the maximum turn time come out to exactly the same values as what we currently have in the WC preliminaries and finals. Even the initial reserve for the WC finals is the same. Nice. 15s/2m30s/100/0/1h/2m30s - Blitz 15 sec/move 30s/3m/100/0/2h/3m - Fast 30 sec/move 45s/3m30s/100/0/3h/3m30s - Quick 45 sec/move 1m/4m/100/0/4h/4m - Regular 1 min/move 1m30s/5m/100/0/6h/5m - Match 1.5 min/move 2m/6m/100/0/8h/6m - Slow 2 min/move |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by rbarreira on Mar 4th, 2011, 12:42pm on 03/04/11 at 11:54:41, omar wrote:
But they will try to save enough time to fill up the reserve, which then doesn't fill it up so they'll perpetually be using less time than they could. I didn't think much about this, I may be missing something... |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Mar 4th, 2011, 1:13pm on 03/04/11 at 11:54:41, omar wrote:
It is spectator-unfriendly if a move is too slow or if a move is too fast. The maximum time per move only prevents slow moves. Banking less than 100% of unused time addresses the other half of the issue. It discourages the players from making a quick move. Think about the extreme case of banking 0% of unused time; the players would have no incentive to move faster than the per-move time increment, because they would gain no reserve. The upshot would be that every move would take exactly the same time. The game would be played at a perfectly steady pace. Banking only 75% of reserve doesn't enforce an absolutely equal time on every move, but it nudges things in that direction. It makes it a better strategy for a player who is about to blitz out a move to stop and think for a few more seconds instead. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Mar 5th, 2011, 7:11pm on 03/04/11 at 13:13:58, Fritzlein wrote:
I see what you mean, but the nudge might be too weak and not worth the exception it causes in what people expect. In practice it seems that if players want to add more time to reserve they move rather fast anyways even with 75% of unused time being added to reserve. In favor of keeping things intuitive for the standard time controls, let go with 100% and see how that works out. I suppose that one could also argue that adding more time to reserve will slightly reduce the need for players to move faster and add more time to reserve. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by rbarreira on Mar 5th, 2011, 7:23pm I'm not sure I understood the scope for these new time controls. Besides human games, is the current plan to make all the existing bots or this year's bots use the new time controls? If that's the case , I'm not sure all bots will work with the maximum turn times. This would be a bigger issue than the reserve accumulation I was talking about before, as it could cause outright timeouts... Or is the maximum turn time enforced by artificially sending a low reserve to the bots before each turn? |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Mar 5th, 2011, 8:05pm I added the ability to enter custom time controls. Also added time controls based on M/2m+2M/100/0/240M/2m+2M to the list of common time controls. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Mar 5th, 2011, 8:10pm on 03/05/11 at 19:23:47, rbarreira wrote:
These standard time controls would be used for event games. I suppose we could also change the bots to use these, but that's going take a some time for me to edit all the bot config files. The server sends a lower reserve time so older bots should still work with the maximum turn time. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Mar 5th, 2011, 10:55pm on 03/02/11 at 12:39:53, omar wrote:
This list is uninformative, since when one of the players is a bot, the human has no choice of time control. It would be more interesting to query only HvH games, and exclude event games where the players have no choice. Then you would see what time control humans choose in exactly the circumstances when they have a choice. on 03/05/11 at 20:05:52, omar wrote:
Very cool feature. I tried it out and it seemed to work, although I canceled the game before playing. Quote:
With the ability to create custom time controls, we should look for ways to shorten the list of standard ones. I'm thinking just ten is plenty. From the current list I would remove "Relaxed" because nobody wants to play at 2.5 minutes per move. I would change "Slow" to 4 minutes per move. I noticed that when we offered 2, 3, or 4 minute games, nobody ever chose 3. The people who chose 4 were all beginners who wanted a lot of time to figure out how to play as they went along. Actually, I would change the name of the 2-minute game to "Slow", and the name of the 4-minute game to "Glacial", just to give the proper impression. I would remove all of the sudden death time controls. There simply doesn't seem to be any demand for sudden death time controls among experienced players. Chess players who are new to the site may miss sudden death at first, but they quickly adapt. Sudden-death time controls are doable for chess because a chess move can be entered in a second or less, whereas Arimaa moves take at least five seconds to enter, often more like ten seconds counting the animation of the opponent's move, so it becomes silly to play with no increment. Then I would wipe out all of the "Experimental" time controls. They are just confusing. Forget them. If anyone wants to experiment, they can, so you don't need to try to define an experiment for them. And if any non-standard time control appears to be gaining traction, you can always add it to the list later as it becomes popular. As for postal, I think we could get by with just the most popular one, which is also the Postal Mixer one, and the "no time limit" option, which has a special purpose and needs to stay. I suspect it will improve the average user experience to offer fewer choices. And of course the other choices aren't really gone now that folks can make custom time controls. If people really want sudden death, or large reserve and small increment, or 3-day postal with no initial reserve, etc., they can still have them. Simplify, simplify, simplify. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by chessandgo on Mar 6th, 2011, 3:43am I don't think that all moves are equal. As a spectator, I would much rather see a player move in 10 sec to make an obvious capture and then think for 2mn 50 sec in a complicated position rather than have that same player use 1mn 30 for both moves because the time control gave him the incentive to do so. That's even more true with commentated games. I understand a beginner spectator would get bored after 10 mn of thinking time on the same move in a non-commentated game, but with the commentator(s) there to explain stuff, that's totally fine. If the player needs time to figure things out then for sure the commentator(s) need time to explain what's going on as well. To me, the most player-friendly the time setting the most spectator-friendly, but well :) |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by rbarreira on Mar 6th, 2011, 3:20pm on 03/05/11 at 20:10:50, omar wrote:
In that case, the only potential remaining problem I see as far as bots go is that there's no maximum reserve limit in these suggested time controls, which might confuse bots that expect it (I'm pretty sure mine will have some problems with that). I would recommend not changing bot controls unless there's very heavy demand for it, besides having to edit a lot of files you would also have to test all bots with the new time controls. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Janzert on Mar 6th, 2011, 3:56pm on 03/06/11 at 15:20:40, rbarreira wrote:
Pretty sure old versions of opfor (2008 and possibly 2009) had problems with that as well. Janzert |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Mar 9th, 2011, 8:02am on 03/05/11 at 22:55:03, Fritzlein wrote:
Thanks for the suggestion. Here are the results: Code:
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Mar 9th, 2011, 9:10am on 03/09/11 at 08:02:59, omar wrote:
Grouping those by the increment only: 1580 - 60s 1180 - 45s 613 - 30s 433 - 2min 395 - 15s 267 - 90s 200 - 4min 167 - 3min 146 - sudden death I believe this supports what I was saying before about simplification. We can lose the sudden death entirely, replace the 2.5min and 3min with just 4min as a catch-all for "really slow", and get rid of the long list of "experimental" time controls. (If I remember correctly, the 3min time control only started to catch up to the 4min time control because you removed 4min from the list of options, and before that the 4min was more than twice as popular.) The shortened list will cover over 90% of what users actually want, and if they really want something off-list, they can use the new "custom" feature to get it. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Mar 9th, 2011, 9:37am on 03/06/11 at 15:20:40, rbarreira wrote:
Yes, I'll need to test the bots with these time controls before changing it. I might have to set the max reserve limit to a very high value for bots that expect it. Eventually I would like to change them so that we are consistent. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by rbarreira on Mar 10th, 2011, 4:20am on 03/09/11 at 09:37:00, omar wrote:
Setting a very high reserve limit should prevent any timeouts, but it won't prevent bad time management due to broken assumptions (including, for some bots, the usage of a significantly lower percentage of the time than they would normally use, as they'll be trying to accumulate reserve). |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Migi on Aug 22nd, 2011, 8:44pm I haven't been able to all posts on the 4 pages of this thread, so I'm sorry if I'm saying things that have already been said, but I would like to make a few notes about this: on 01/19/11 at 17:40:34, Fritzlein wrote:
I disagree. I think everyone, even those who just learned the rules, can enjoy these videos. In fact, I have some evidence to back this up. I occasionally like to watch a YouTube video where a really strong chess player plays an online blitz match while giving his thoughts on the game as he plays, and the comments in those videos come from real beginners as well as other strong chess players. It's true that a weaker player can't see all the tactics, and occasionally they think "why can't you just take piece X with your pawn?", to which there might be some refutation too deep for them to see. So they can't understand the game completely, but they can understand the commentary. Because commentary is mostly about strategy, and if it's about tactics then the tactics are explained. Actually, even world champion level strategy discussions can be understood by beginners. Being "weak" in the east, having pieces "tied up", etc can be understood by anyone, even if you don't know the specifics. There are also Arimaa-specific concepts like "hostage", "blockade", "frame", "phalanx" etc, but I think people pick up on these concepts really quickly. Definitely in a video. In fact, I think if you let a person with no knowledge of Arimaa watch the world championship with commentary for 10 to 20 minutes, they would know most of the rules, basic strategy, and have a rating of about 1200. If someone would reupload all the commentated videos to YouTube, I think we might see some new players come from there (for example if these videos start showing up as "related videos" next to chess videos). But also it would give people a convenient place to watch, comment and discuss videos of past WC's. If you agree, and give me permission, I would volunteer to make a new YouTube channel (called "arimaavideos" or something) and reupload all videos from http://arimaa.com/arimaa/mwiki/index.php/Videos that aren't already on YouTube to that channel. And if it turns out to be nothing, we haven't lost anything either. (One problem, though, is the fact that most videos are longer than 15 minutes. I guess I'll have to break up the videos in parts then? Does someone know a better solution for this?) |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Aug 22nd, 2011, 10:19pm on 08/22/11 at 20:44:39, Migi wrote:
I hope you are right, and I don't see why anyone would object to you trying to popularize Arimaa commentary videos among a broader audience. If it works we gain a larger base of players/fans, and if it doesn't work it has cost us nothing but your time and effort. on 01/20/11 at 12:15:56, omar wrote:
Omar, revisiting this thread leaves me just as puzzled as I was before about your desire to limit the participation of World Championship to the top-rated players. The idea that beginner-only events would pull in lots of new players seems like a fantasy to me. Right now we have the Arimaa World League, where the ratings budgets mean that lower-rated players are guaranteed playing time and can expect to be paired with other lower-rated players, and we are broadcasting in the game room announcements that we need newcomers to join, and the Rockies are begging in the AWL forum for volunteers, and we can't get anyone lower than 1960 (Hirocon) to volunteer for us this week. It is all well and good to envision ratings-limited tournaments to attract lower-rated players because such tournaments would, according to some logic, be more enjoyable for them, but the fact is that right now hardly anyone is signing up for just that type of game. I love the AWL, but it doesn't have the sex appeal of a championship. Meanwhile last year's World Championship generated a huge paid participation. I admit that I have my moments of telling people that they should want something other than what they actually want, but in this case it seems crazy to be so dictatorial. If weaker players want to sign up for the Arimaa World Championship but otherwise basically ignore Arimaa events, why fight it? The drawing power of the Arimaa World Championship, for whatever psychological reason it happens, is a blessing that we should run with. That's just my two cents, though. It's your show, and if you have determined on a course of action, I will also eventually say, although for different reasons, why fight it? |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Hippo on Aug 23rd, 2011, 12:41am Yes, I would like open WC. I am not sure how Nombril, but I would probably left comunity not being motivated by WC2010 participation. I don't think there is enough opportunity for talented newcommers to raise their WHR quickly enough to be included. Migi@: With the linked feature of the YouTube videos it could be doable. Not all audios are of the top quality so you have to make a selection. (Probably starting backward in time from final games till you decided it's enough). The openning phase waiting for the setup should be probably cut and may be rewritten to the headlines. The ending phase on the contrary usually could stay as it is as it's much easier to skip end than start:). Yes I agree this effort could help popularise arimaa a lot more. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Nombril on Aug 23rd, 2011, 8:24am Yes, it was really fun in 2010 hoping to be a dark horse and surprise people by out performing my starting rating. A new player's actual skill can often greatly exceed their current rating. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by chessandgo on Aug 26th, 2011, 12:08pm I can't remember if I posted here a few months ago, but I'm obviously in favor of an open-to-all WC as well. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Harren on Aug 27th, 2011, 5:14am I am also in favour of an open WC, like it was the last few years. I probably wouldn't have played enough to have been able to participate this year with the new proposed rules. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Oct 25th, 2011, 7:00pm Thanks everyone for your feedback. It seems the most popular format for the 2012 WC would be a triple elimination tournament with no limit on the number of players. However, this will be the last year that I will organize and serve as coordinator for the WC. In future years I would like the Arimaa community to organize it. The tools are now available to do that. Joel has been using them for the AWL. I think it's time I have less involvment in organizing the WC; this will help ensure the continuity of the WC. Perhaps the community can organize itself under some association similar to FIDE. But this year I would like to run the WC tournament the way I want. So here is how it will work. I am giving away $200 USD to the best human Arimaa player. Anyone can come and claim it by registering to play in the WC tournament. The registration fee is $100 and it will be added to the WC prize fund. If no one else wants to challenge you then you will be crowned the champion and walk away with $300 without having played a single game. However, if others have also registered then a floating triple elimination tournament will be held to determine the champion. The prize fund will be divided by the number of games in the tournament and the winner of each game will receive this amount of the prize fund. There will not be tie breaker games for second and third place. But all players who achieve these levels will be recognized for these positions. There is no limit on the number of players that can register. Seeding for the tournament is based on WHR ratings. However, any player can pay more than the registration fee to improve their seeding. Thus, seeding is based on the amount above $100 the player has paid to register with ties broken by WHR ratings. All amounts paid to improve seeding are also added to the WC prize fund. There is no waiver of the registration fee. A player can withdraw from registration but will not be refunded the registration fee or any amount paid above it. The time control for all rounds will be 1m30s/6m/100/0/6h/6m. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Oct 25th, 2011, 9:25pm This new format certainly increases the role of money. Last year many people who had little chance of winning back any prize money nevertheless thought that $10 was a reasonable entertainment fee to play in a six-round tournament. I doubt many would of those be back for $100 and possible elimination in three rounds. For the sake of argument, let me explore the logical extreme of people deciding to enter the tournament or not based only on their expected prize payout, and not based at all on love of Arimaa or thrill of competing. I will use current WHR ratings to make a rough estimate of payouts, and for the moment neglect paying extra to improve seeding. Someone with a tournament simulator could produce more accurate numbers, but this is just a first pass. Clearly chessandgo will profit from entering no matter who else competes. Should I enter too? Player Rating Wins Payout ------ ------ ---- ------ chessandgo 2657 3.00 $254 Fritzlein 2561 1.73 $146 Since I stand to gain more than my $100 entry fee, I should definitely play. What about Adanac? Player Rating Wins Payout ------ ------ ---- ------ chessandgo 2657 4.04 $260 Fritzlein 2561 2.81 $181 Adanac . 2400 0.92 $ 59 It turns out that Adanac will not recoup his entry fee on average, so he shouldn't enter. Of course, Adanac is underrated at the moment after a Postal Mixer he couldn't devote sufficient time to, whereas I am overrated for the opposite reason. But chessandgo's rating is approximately in line with his live play results, so jiggering the calculation by giving a few of my rating points to Adanac only swaps money between the two of us. Even if you fix it so that all three of us would profit on average, nobody else could profitably enter the tournament against the three of us. Anyone who tried would, on average, lose money, while increasing the expected profit of the top three. The bluffing game of secretly paying more into the prize pool to get a better seeding may change this calculation somewhat, but I expect not by much. Even if player#4 got the top seed for free, he would still have to play each of the three of us in the first three rounds in order to respect the pairing rule avoiding repeat pairings above all else. One way to look at it is that even in a three-way tournament, chessandgo is getting nearly $200 more than his entry fee on average. That leaves almost no room for anyone else to profit, on average, unless the prize fund is pumped up by greater fools with even lower rating who enter as well. Admittedly, not everyone will make their calculation purely on expected return of money. Perhaps some will chalk up their expected net loss to the joy of playing in the Arimaa World Championship. Perhaps others will be disgusted that the tournament format seems to be about money rather than about Arimaa, and decline to enter even if they stand to profit. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Oct 25th, 2011, 10:01pm Pardon me for psycho-analyzing, Omar, but this post leads me to guess that you are tired of being a slave to the demands of the Arimaa community. What is fun for us may be boring, taxing, and exhausting to you. It seems you have decided that you need to do what would be fun for you, even if it runs contrary to every opinion expressed by every other member of the Arimaa community as to what they think the ideal World Championship format would be. I absolutely think that Arimaa needs to be fun for you. I know full well that you aren't likely to profit from Arimaa for many years to come, if ever. Given that Arimaa.com is a hobby that is a huge time drain, and a money sink as well, the only justification for your continuing to do it is that you are having fun. It may be that my asking for things too often and offering thanks and/or offering assistance too seldom has somewhat undermined your Arimaa fun. If so, I apologize. Let me thank you again for inventing this great game, for giving us a place to play for free, for contributing prize money to tournaments, and for contributing countless hours on features and events that have made Arimaa.com enjoyable. If you have to pull the plug tomorrow for lack of time or money or enjoyment, I will be sad, but that won't take away from my debt of gratitude for more than seven years of recreation you have provided to me. Thank you and thank you. If there are things that you have been doing, like running the World Championship, that are simply too much burden, I am happy that you are deciding that they need to be organized by someone else. Indeed, it would be better to have no World Championship whatsoever than to have the running of the World Championship cause you to burn out. I wholeheartedly support your decision to pass the baton on this and any other tasks that are making Arimaa.com a greater burden than it is a pleasure. If we in the Arimaa community really love our game as much as we profess, then we will step up and make it happen. If not, well, at least we have the base server code which requires only minimal maintenance and the server rental fee. It is better to have a less spectacular hub of Arimaa activity than no such hub at all, which is what I foresee happening if you let the ever-needy community bleed you dry. I was going to conclude with a plea that you pass the reins of running the World Championship already this year. I think the $100 entry fee you proposed is actively destructive of a great institution for Arimaa. Last year we had great participation, great promotion, great excitement for Arimaa built around the World Championship, and I simply don't see that happening again with a $100 charge at the door. We have a groovy thing going, even if we make zero format and/or software changes from last year, and I don't want to see that awesomeness go away. On further reflection, however, I won't make that request. I want you to do what you enjoy. I want Arimaa to be fun for you again. If you aren't having fun, the party is over for everyone. Therefore, please do exactly as you please, and the result will be an adventure for all of us. I will hang on and try to enjoy the ride. As I often say in chat before my live games, "Don't forget to have fun!" |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Hippo on Oct 26th, 2011, 6:04am What to say ... I am a bit tired from my Arimaa games this year. Especially postal mixer taken me much more time I hoped. I am thinking about skipping next year and concentrate myself on bot programming instead (I hope I have learned already what could be learned in reasonable amount of time). I expect I would watch the turnament anyways. The entry fee is not the main incentive, compared with "Magic the Gathering" it would remain relatively cheap. I were not attending WC's with intention to gain money. But the number of players with intention to participate even on free WC is much smaller than the number of active MTG players, and there is no guarantee the 100$ would give that much fun for the participant. I agree that in the case of 4 participants playing 3 games for 100$ is expensive enough. ... hmm on the contrary it would not last that long ... so I really don't know what I want. But for arimaa propagation I do think short WC is worse. ... I hope c&g, Fritzlein and Nombril are granted ... I am looking forward to see the games. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by UruramTururam on Oct 26th, 2011, 9:55am Heh, heh. For the BGG members who want to play in the championships to obtain the rabbit microbadge it may turn to be the most expensive badge ever... |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Oct 26th, 2011, 12:00pm I do enjoy running the Arimaa events each year. Except that last year the WC was more than I could handle. It wasn't because I was trying to commentate or record the games, it was just the burden of making sure all those games go smoothly and being available if things went wrong. It's like being on call the whole weekend. I wasn't able to give time to other things. What I can handle and what the community wants is diverging, so I hope the community will become more active and organize the WC next year. Even though this years WC will have less participants, it should be quite interesting to watch. Now we will know who really believes they can take on the titans. If you really think you have a chance against these guys, put your money where your mouth is and get in the ring; it's open to everyone. Some may join just to play against the masters, but they will pay their dues for the lessons. Hopefully the event will be short and sweet, with no forfeits, commentary on every game and lots of fireworks on the board. I'm really screwed if we have a turn out like last year :-) |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Oct 26th, 2011, 12:52pm on 10/25/11 at 21:25:52, Fritzlein wrote:
I forgot to mention the payout could be more depending on how much spectators contribute to the prize fund. So it could be worth it even from just the money point of view for Adanac and others to play. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Adanac on Oct 26th, 2011, 1:32pm Originally I wasn’t planning to participate this year due to the time commitments, but this sounds like it could be a really short WC. So maybe I will participate after all (it will be really short if I don’t practice ;D ). If we don’t get many participants then this tournament could be over within 2 months. I just hope that the large prize fund won’t lead to any cheating, but I don’t expect that it will. A couple of questions: Let’s suppose the champion goes 5-2 with 1 bye while the 2nd place finisher is 5-3. Would they receive the same prize money, based upon an equal number of wins, or is there a bonus for 1st place? Will there be a spectator’s contest? Are you going to participate Omar, since you are paying double the required entry fee? Isn’t the lack of a refund and the desire to keep one’s participation a secret going to mean that everyone will join on the final day? That’s the opposite of last year where there were incentives to register early. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by aaaa on Oct 26th, 2011, 2:06pm $100 seems like an awful lot. Couldn't you perhaps ask for a pre-registration instead and then determine the main fee from the number of prospective participants? As a barrier, the pre-registration itself could require a little amount of money (possibly always refunded), so that those signing up would show at least some serious contemplation of participating. Having money affect seeding seems like a horrible idea that would bring into disrepute the integrity of the championship. Why should how much money someone can spare, affect who is determined to be the best Arimaa player? Really, between this proposal and a championship that, apart from being limited to the 16 highest rated participants, at least isn't so horribly elitist and inequitable, I'd choose the latter in a heartbeat. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Adanac on Oct 26th, 2011, 2:37pm on 10/26/11 at 14:06:02, aaaa wrote:
Maybe we could get some sponsorship from Wall Street? They'll like a tournament that allows wealthy people to buy their way to the top. That's also my least favourite rule. I don't mind a steep entry fee if Omar is really determined to limit the number of participants. But allowing people to "buy" a better seed seems very elitist. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by UruramTururam on Oct 26th, 2011, 2:54pm In fact the Community may well test its organizing skill and prepare a WCQ - a qualification tournament with $100 prize(s) but not to be payed in cash but as registration fees for the proper Championships. :D |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Oct 26th, 2011, 2:55pm on 10/26/11 at 13:32:37, Adanac wrote:
Aha, someone does share Omar's goal of keeping the number of participants small. I stand corrected. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Oct 26th, 2011, 3:17pm on 10/26/11 at 13:32:37, Adanac wrote:
I, for one, will delay my decision. I'm not sure how busy next semester will be; for example I may be starting research instead of continuing in my teaching assistantship position. If I were pressed for time and there wasn't a large entry fee, I would play in spite of being unprepared, but with $100 on the line, I would rather skip the tournament than play half-heartedly. You are quite right about the reversed incentives for the timing of registration. Last year I wanted everyone to know I was playing. The more people that had already signed up, the more incentive there was for additional people to join. There was momentum. This year it is to my advantage to make everyone think I am not going to play. Maybe if it is two days before deadline and only chessandgo has signed up, then mistre will think, "Heck, I'll give it a shot." Once his dead money is in the pot (with no opportunity for a refund), my odds of turning a profit go up, so I can jump in at the last minute. Indeed this strategy will work extra well if I can convince chessandgo to join me in it. If he tells everyone he has quit Arimaa for poker, and I say I am too busy to play this year, maybe some 1500-rated player can be tricked into thinking he can steal the prize fund. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Oct 26th, 2011, 3:23pm on 10/26/11 at 13:32:37, Adanac wrote:
And will there be prize allocation again this year? And will there be a fee for the Postal Mixer? The $10 fee for the 2011 Postal Mixer didn't improve things over 2010; on the contrary we had more timeouts despite the monetary incentive that I hoped would insure seriousness. Perhaps there were simply too many weeks between the time people signed up and the time play began. That is an argument for going back to the 2010 method: Let the Postal Mixer be free but don't open registration until the week before. For anyone keeping tabs on my approval/disapproval of Omar's ideas, I thought he was nuts to make the 2010 Postal Mixer free, but that worked out well. So take my critique of his 2012 World Championship format with a grain of salt. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Adanac on Oct 26th, 2011, 3:28pm on 10/26/11 at 14:55:47, Fritzlein wrote:
What a difference a year makes. Last year I proposed a long series of matches between the top players. ::) But sometime during the spring or summer I just lost the energy for Arimaa (and all other hobbies) and haven't gotten that passion back yet. What I like about Omar’s proposal is that everyone is welcome to join, but realistically we won’t have a tournament that extends into April. That’s probably not good for the Arimaa community, especially for spectators that like watching lots of Arimaa games, but it’s good for people like me that were waffling about joining a lengthy tournament. And it’s not just me, Hippo also seems to be more likely to participate in a shorter tournament, but agrees that it's not necessarily in the best interests of the whole community: on 10/26/11 at 06:04:39, Hippo wrote:
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Oct 26th, 2011, 3:43pm on 10/26/11 at 15:28:03, Adanac wrote:
If I end up playing, it will be to my advantage if you substitute money for passion, and put $100 into the pot without practicing or studying at all. ;D But for me it would certainly work the opposite: if I don't have the time for Arimaa, I won't throw away money on Arimaa, whereas if I do have the time, then the probability of winning money will draw me in. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by ocmiente on Oct 26th, 2011, 4:35pm I was wondering if I could pay to reduce my rating (half seriously)? Regarding the length of the tournament, it might be nice to play three of the top players with a good chance that some of the games might have live commentary for feedback, and then be eliminated. After participating for the first time last year, I can definitely see an advantage in having a short tournament. The obvious problem with this is if a weak player paid to be seeded at the top, then I wouldn't be able to play the top players by paying to decrease my rating. Good thing that's not an option. On the other hand, I could just intentionally trash my rating and get a low seeding for free... Back to the post that started this thread, Omar suggested that "The WC tournament:
I'm OK with Omar's proposal, and will probably participate in the tournament with these terms as stated. $100 might be a little steep, but I've gotten a lot of free entertainment value from the Arimaa site, and figure it's a good way to support the community. However, regarding the tournament rules, to be fair, and (I think) objective, I do think that allowing money to influence the seeding may compromise the first and fourth bullets. The $100 entry fee compromises the 3rd. I have to conclude that bullet 2 is a priority. Fair enough. I can appreciate the desire for a short tournament. If I am able to participate, I'll be playing for the experience rather than for winning any cash prize or winning the championship. So, I'm not inclined to get bent out of shape regardless of what the rules are. I also think that opening up the 2013 tournament rules to the community gives all of us a great opportunity to shape the nature of the competition in the years to come. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Dolus on Oct 26th, 2011, 5:00pm on 10/26/11 at 09:55:01, UruramTururam wrote:
This is what I was thinking of. A $100 rabbit microbadge. :) |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Oct 26th, 2011, 6:43pm on 10/26/11 at 16:35:10, ocmiente wrote:
True, but notice that Omar gave the 3rd point the lowest priority, so he is being consistent. He wants a broad pool of players to play in other events, just not in the World Championship. Part of the reason I have a different attitude is that these hypothetical other events geared towards beginners have never materialized. If there was even one other large live tournament, I might be persuaded by the argument that we shouldn't weigh down the World Championship with too many objectives. I might agree that we shouldn't let the objective of popularizing Arimaa interfere with the objective of crowning the best player. But the reality is that there is no other vehicle to share the load, so what we are taking out of the World Championship isn't being put into another event. Hopefully 33 players will sign up again this year despite the $100 entry fee. Then we will have the best of both worlds. Here is an approximate outcome based on last year's results, given a $3500 prize pool and elimination after three losses. Player Wins Money ------ ---- ----- chessandgo 9 342 Adanac . 8 304 Tuks . 6 228 Fritzlein 5.5 209 Hippo . 5 190 The_Jeh. 4.5 171 jdb . 4.5 171 omar . 4.5 171 rabbits. 4 152 Nombril. 4 152 hanzack. 4 152 99of9 . 3 114 woh . 3 114 Nevermind 3 114 Sconibulus 3 114 ArifSyed 3 114 Harren . 2 76 ocmiente 2 76 megamau. 2 76 ChrisB . 2 76 knarl . 2 76 Heyckie. 2 76 qswanger 1 38 ginrunner 1 38 naveed . 1 38 oali . 1 38 722caasi 1 38 b599 . 1 38 beancrisp 0 .0 Belteshazzar 0 .0 Labradorboy 0 .0 ddyer . 0 .0 Rad . 0 .0 So the large field enriched the top, but also made it easier to break even for anyone above average. The money doesn't all fly to the top under a pay-per win system. So if lots of people register this year, I won't be able to look at Arimaa as a principal source of revenue, but I will be able to relax about whether I will lose money by playing. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by megajester on Oct 27th, 2011, 12:39am on 10/26/11 at 14:54:40, UruramTururam wrote:
+1 From a purely theoretical standpoint, if you really want the best player in the world to be crowned champion you have to think of this. It's the same logic as making it possible for poor kids to win a scholarship to go to university. I will not be participating in the WC, but I would just like to point out that $100 is an awful lot of money in some parts of the world. For example, the Turkish minimum wage is $340 per month, net. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by chessandgo on Oct 27th, 2011, 6:00am Omar, do you intend players to focus on the WC title or on money in this tournament? The rules seem to have a lot of emphasis on money. It reminds me of what poker players call High Rollers tournaments: high buy-in, small (and usually strong) fields, some focus on glory, most focus on money. Would you consider making this tournament a "High Roller Arimaa Tournament", and having the WC 2012 have similar rules to the previous ones? on 10/26/11 at 12:00:37, omar wrote:
I don't understand the bolded part. I don't think someone registering in a WC is thus claiming to be better than the current champ. If I had had to make a money-expectation based decision to enter my first WC under such rules, I suppose I would have had to forfeit. By registering and playing I did not claim that I was better than Fritzlein and 99of9, as I wasn't, just that intended to play my best and take a shot at the title if things went my way. And otherwise to make the better players work for it, to be a worthy opponent and make them display their arimaa skills. I like the fact that the champ is not necessarily the "best", but rather the one who played best in the given tournament. Everyone has a shot, everyone has to work for it, and in the end we can congratulate the winner for something done, and not for something been. I wouldn't like that someone who would have a chance to become champion be unable to enter because his/her chances were too small. Doing one's best to overcome the odds in important games, that's what a championship is to me, and that's why it's fascinating. I think the title would be greatly devaluated by such "have-a-shot-at-it" players not being able (or at least strongly discouraged) to play. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Dolus on Oct 27th, 2011, 10:03am on 10/26/11 at 18:43:47, Fritzlein wrote:
I've been having fun introducing Arimaa to my local community. I've considered having a small tournament amongst some of them to spur more interest, and since I only have one board, I was considering making use of this site to run my local tournament, which would also add the benefit of forcing them to become members of this community. If I can learn what's involved in running a tournament and how to do it, I think I'd be interested in making time to host a beginner tournament among the Arimaa community (and of course inviting outsiders to join). Clearly, I don't know the level of commitment involved, but I would like to figure out what would be involved/required, and see if I could feasibly put something together. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Oct 27th, 2011, 11:58am on 10/27/11 at 10:03:36, Dolus wrote:
Omar created a tournament director tool. This can handle some things like pairing the players automatically (unless you want to pair them by hand), and creating scheduled games for people to sit down at the start of each round. There is still a fair bit of elbow grease involved on the part of the TD, but it sure beats meeting in the chat room and trying to orchestrate everything by chat (although you still want to have that component, too). You might be able to convince a more experienced community member to be your TD, or you could just ask Omar to give you the permissions necessary to use the TD tool yourself. You probably also want to create a new forum thread for your event in the events category where you can ask questions and recruit players. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by megajester on Oct 28th, 2011, 1:46pm After finishing this post I realised it's rather long so I'm going to split it into topics. If we're going to do it this way, let's make a meal of it. If the field is going to be 8 players or less I would be in favour of a more traditional knockout tournament, with each match a best-of-3 or 5. A World Championship Tournament between 4 players consisting of 3 games just doesn't sound right. How to realize point 3 in Omar's original checklist. OK here's my idea, although I'm not sure who would run it... It's basically the same as Ururam's just a little more fleshed out. Call it the World Championship Qualifier Tournament. Make it floating elimination or Swiss or whatever. Either way, everybody signs up and promises to pay between 10 and 15 dollars as an entry fee. Then you take the number of people who signed up and work out how many players' entry fees for the championship proper will come out of the money. So let's say you have 17 applicants. Everybody pays $12 making for a pot of $204, which means the top 2 at the end of the tournament will have their entry fees paid for them at the World Championship. (The organizer gets to keep the $4 ;D) There are other ways to lighten the load, Omar. Please reconsider. I'm a very busy person myself too and that's why right from the beginning the World League's rescheduling system is specifically designed to make sure I don't have to be on call all weekend. If one the players can't make it for the time the scheduler sets for them, he has to ask his opponent for an alternate time (and his opponent has the right to say no). Up until now the opponents have always obliged. Then it's the players' responsibility to announce beforehand what time they've agreed upon, and then to prove they're present when the time comes, and then to state in the chatroom before they start that they accept the game as official. It's as airtight as I can make it, and even when players aren't clued in enough to do everything they're supposed to they leave enough of a paper trail to rule out any disputes. Plus I can come back whenever I want between Monday and Wednesday to check up on what happened. I know this might sound a little strange coming from a person who's almost definitely not going to be taking part in the WC, but I do have a stake in this community, and seeing as the WC is one of the fundamental pillars of the community I've got a really bad feeling about this new format. I'd hate for it to be a disaster. So from one tourney organizer to another, here's my 2 cents. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by ocmiente on Oct 28th, 2011, 2:20pm on 10/28/11 at 13:46:48, megajester wrote:
Omar declared a 'floating triple elimination tournament', so that would be 9 games (or more) with 4 players. Trying the best 3/5 would not add many games, if any. on 10/28/11 at 13:46:48, megajester wrote:
That sounds really great to me. Who would run it is the big question. Would it be in lieu of having another World League event? Regarding the cost, I don't want to give the impression that I'm trying to keep the organizer from realizing a $4 gain, but on the other hand, I suspect that whoever does it isn't going to do it for the wealth the position will bring. How about if all of the money goes into the WC prize fund? $100 is for the winner's entry fees, whatever is left over is for the 2nd place winner's entry fees, and if there is more left than the 3rd place winner gets that that amount deducted from his entry fee. If someone who wins decides not to participate in the WC (or decides that they would rather let the next winner in line get the money), then the money would go to the next person down the line, etc. If very few people sign up, then the winner would have whatever amount was in the pool deducted from his WC entry fee. I think it's a great idea, and would be an interesting event to fill the time between now and the WC. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by mistre on Oct 30th, 2011, 12:24am on 10/25/11 at 19:00:30, omar wrote:
What if the best players don't want to pay a $100 registration fee? You could have a situation where the best player doesn't win because he decided to not even enter. What's worse, you could give $200 to someone that doesn't even play a game. To me that is a far worse scenario then having too many sign up. If it was up to me, I would keep it similar to what has been done in the past except the open classic would only be for the lower rated players and would be run by the Arimaa Community (with the top players earning byes to the finals). That way the lower ranked players get more games and the top ranked players can have their short tournament. As for the registration fee - I favor something like $20 to keep it affordable. I won't be able to play if it is much higher than that. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by megajester on Oct 30th, 2011, 7:15am on 10/28/11 at 14:20:57, ocmiente wrote:
What is the answer to this question? In the AWL survey I've had roughly 5 players for each club promise they should be available for at least one of the rounds, with 3 more undecided as to which club they want to play for. So if we want another season this year, we can do it, but we need to be sure it won't clash with any WC preliminaries. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Oct 30th, 2011, 10:12am The tradition of satellite tournaments for people who can't afford the main tournament is well-established in the poker world from people who want to play in the World Series of Poker but can't afford the $10,000 buy-in. Officially there were 6,865 participants in the WSOP main event this year, but in reality there were many more who played in satellite tournaments and didn't qualify. I have to say that I don't quite get the logic. If $10,000 for a WSOP seat is too expensive, then $500 for a 1/20 chance of a WSOP seat is also too expensive. It's the same price either way, the same average payout per buy-in. The only difference is if you think the satellite tournament itself is worth playing. So then it isn't really about the average prize per price of entry, it is about the tournament experience. One pays to play for the reflected excitement of the WSOP. If you bust out of a WSOP satellite, it sort of feels like having busted out of the WSOP main event. You were there for the challenge, you participated in the action, and you just didn't lose as much as those who lost in the main event. Megajester, for the good of the community, please don't cancel an event with a high probability of success for fear of conflicting with an event that has a high probability of not happening or fizzling if it does. The main point of a World Championship satellite is to let everyone play, but the AWL already lets everyone play, so the social role is already mostly being filled. The only leftover issue is that the World Championship is more glorious, and people want a piece of the glory, but the fact of the matter is that Omar has put a $100 price on that. If we chip in $10 each, it still costs $100 to play. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by chessandgo on Oct 30th, 2011, 10:47am on 10/30/11 at 10:12:42, Fritzlein wrote:
QFT as you folks say. Btw Joel, looking at recent forum posts, everyone sports an AWL badge, besides yourself who made them... That's hardly fair. How about: (ok, I need to work on my paint skills) http://img11.hostingpics.net/pics/962526AWLfounder.png (http://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=962526AWLfounder.png) |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by megajester on Oct 30th, 2011, 3:54pm Ohhh thanks! But I've only got 4 characters left in my signature... |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by ginrunner on Oct 30th, 2011, 4:19pm on 10/30/11 at 15:54:42, megajester wrote:
Thats why you get rid of the "Click for:" ... problem solved |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by megajester on Oct 30th, 2011, 4:59pm I need an extra 33 characters to add this: [ img ] http://tinyurl.com/6g8w64n [ / img ] |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by chessandgo on Oct 30th, 2011, 7:12pm Ah, I never used the signature before, didn't know about the character limitation. Well, we all know who you are anyway :) |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Oct 30th, 2011, 8:07pm on 10/30/11 at 16:59:38, megajester wrote:
http://bit.ly/sZd0Ot is 6 characters shorter. "tinyurl" is so verbose... |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Oct 31st, 2011, 1:12pm on 10/26/11 at 13:32:37, Adanac wrote:
Yes, they would receive the same prize money. It is based on number of games won. Yes, there will be a spectator contest. No, I won't be in the WC this year. I clearly don't have a chance against the top players. No need for me to get in the way and slow down the tournament. Although it is tempting since it means high quality commented games against strong opponents. I changed my mind about the refund and initial ranking based on registration fee. More about that later. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Oct 31st, 2011, 3:57pm When I tried to implement the system for initial ranking based on registration fee, it opened up some issues I couldn't decide on. Should players be allowed to see how much others have given in registration fees? How many times can they add to the registration fee? Can they retract some amount above the required registration fee if they change their mind and want to lower their ranking? Hummm, I don't know. So for now I decided to drop this. My initial thoughts on this was that if someone thought that the initial ranking would help them get more wins then let them decide how much they want to pay for that. But maybe it's not worth it for the additional issues it opens up. To counter the incentive to register late, the registration fee will start at $80 and increase by $1 per day. But since this could hurt someone who legitimately does not know if they can play or not until much later, I dropped the no refund rule. I suppose someone could abuse this by signing up to make the prize fund seem bigger and then pulling out at the end. So I was considering something like a decreasing refund if you pull out the last week before the deadline, but decided it's not worth doing this right now. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Oct 31st, 2011, 4:11pm on 10/26/11 at 15:23:45, Fritzlein wrote:
There won't be allocation of prizes this year for 1st, 2nd and 3rd. The prize funds will also be separate due to integrating them with the tournament management tool. But it will be possible to add to the prize funds. For the postal mixer, I'm thinking of requiring a deposit. It is much easier to do this now with the point system in place. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Oct 31st, 2011, 5:58pm on 10/27/11 at 06:00:33, chessandgo wrote:
This is all due to me not wanting the WC tournament to have too many players because the number of games was getting too much for my schedule. Since many people didn't like the idea of limiting the number of players based on rating, I figured a high entry fee would be a good alternative solution. It might work, it might flop. I don't know, this is the first time we are trying it. But trying different things is the only way we will find out. Even if it doesn't work, it's not the end of Arimaa; we can always try something else next year. Like I said earlier, if the community wants to organize the WC next year, that would be great. Quote:
I was just trash talking. Don't take it seriously. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Oct 31st, 2011, 6:12pm on 10/27/11 at 10:03:36, Dolus wrote:
We have a tournament management tool that helps with pairing and scheduling the games. It's takes a little getting used to, but it works. Send me a message through the Contact page and I can try to help you with this. Thanks for offering to run a beginners tournament. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Oct 31st, 2011, 6:40pm on 10/30/11 at 00:24:54, mistre wrote:
It's possible, but I don't think it's highly probable. The best player would get back more than the $100 they put up. Quote:
This is similar to what I had proposed originally. It would require limiting the number of players in the top ranked players tournament based on ratings. Quote:
Yes, a lot of people can afford to lose $20, but they will think twice if they might lose $100. However, if they knew that they had a high chance of getting back more than the $100 they put up a lot of people would enter. For example if the initial prize fund was say $2000. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Oct 31st, 2011, 10:17pm I want to thank everybody that has contributed to this discussion. I really appreciate the feedback and it has helped me tweak my initial proposal to something which I think is much better. In the end I have to pull the trigger and finalize on something. Although the community would like a WC with a large number of participants, I am sorry I am personally trying to avoid that. Last year I was a bit naive and was also trying to get as many people as possible to join the WC. After it started I realized this was getting too much for me to handle. But maybe what is happening is a good thing. Perhaps it's a good sign that the WC is getting too big for me to handle and that I would like the community to organize it in the future. Maybe this is part of Arimaa's natural growth and was destined to happen. We'll see. But if it doesn't happen I'll still try to do the best I can to keep the WC going. I know you all want the best for Arimaa and so do I; we definitely share that goal in common. We may differ on how to go about things. But in the end, regardless of our difference, when show time comes, we have to put our differences aside, unite and try to make this years event better than any of the previous ones. It may seem that we are doomed for failure because less people will be playing in the WC, but it all depends on how you measure success. I like to measure success by how many people are watching the games. So I would like to break our previous records of simultaneous logins and listeners. Everyone can help with achieving this goal by inviting their friends and family to watch the games with commentary. I spent a lot of time last week and this past weekend trying to get things finished up so we can start the registrations in November. Finally here are the links to the event pages: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/wc/2012/ http://arimaa.com/arimaa/wcc/2012/ Still have to do the Postal Mixer. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Oct 31st, 2011, 10:48pm on 10/31/11 at 15:57:57, omar wrote:
The current instructions are pretty confusing on this point. In one place it still says $100 is required. Nowhere does it say on what day the registration will be $80, or how much it will be on January 1, the final day to register. Is the clock ticking as of November 1, with a $141 registration fee by the end? I hope you are satisfied with this rule and willing to stick with it, because it will be very difficult to change later without being unfair. If it comes near the deadline and only two people are registered and nobody else is signing up because it costs $140, there might be a temptation to change the rules or make exceptions, but that would do more damage to the Arimaa World Championship than having a squirrely rule in the first place. on 10/31/11 at 15:57:57, omar wrote:
I might be missing something here, but it seems that allowing full refunds until the last minute will negate any benefit of persuading people to sign up early. Under the present rules I should certainly sign up to play on the first day of registration so as to get the lowest price. So might anyone else who thinks they have any chance of wanting to play. Why not sign up now? I can make my true decision later, indeed right up to January 1, and if I bail out, I haven't lost anything. So you will have my signup but it won't be real. It won't mean anything other than that I am thinking about playing. If others follow the same logic process, we could have fifteen signups in early November, and three people actually playing come January. Maybe the point is that people who sign up early will feel they have made a promise to play that they should only break in an emergency? Would you feel upset if someone signed up without feeling any commitment and later asked for a refund on a whim? That might be what you have referred to as "abuse", but it also seems like what you are creating an incentive to do. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Oct 31st, 2011, 10:55pm on 10/31/11 at 16:11:21, omar wrote:
Yes, with the point system it might even be feasible to go back to prize payouts based on score. If I recall correctly, the original reason to abandon prizes based on score was that paying out prizes was too fussy, not that there was anything wrong with the incentives or with the way the tournament turned out. There is also something to be said for having the Postal Mixer money separate from the money for the other events, since the Postal Mixer starts so much later, and some people will want to register for it after the other events have finished. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by mistre on Nov 1st, 2011, 9:31am on 10/31/11 at 18:40:04, omar wrote:
If the initial prize fund was $2000, then I would seriously consider putting in $100 because I would have a realistic chance to make back my money. I would imagine it is the same with most others, the reward has to worth the amount of risk put in. As it is now, only Chessandgo and Fritzlein, and maybe a few others could feel pretty good about risking $100 with the potential to earn more. Most any other player is surely going to be throwing their $100 away unless they see a bunch of other people around their ranking signing up. However, with the refund rule as it is, they could just pull out at a later date and there could be a mass exodus for refunds at the last minute (as Fritz also pointed out). Why was limiting the WC to only the top ranked players using WHR discarded as an idea? I think it is a far better solution then a high registration fee. Oh well, I will support your decision and will still be interested in the games that do take place (however few they are). |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Nov 1st, 2011, 6:58pm on 10/31/11 at 22:48:05, Fritzlein wrote:
Thanks. I fixed that. Registration starts Nov 7th and ends Jan 1st. By the end the fee would be $135. Quote:
Yes, we will have to stick with it; no exceptions. Quote:
Since I have integrated the point system with the tournament management tool (TMT) one has to have the points in their account to sign up. My guess is that someone who goes through the effort to transfer the money and sign up is probably serious about playing and if they withdraw later it's because they wouldn't be able to play or felt the competition was too strong. But there could be a chain effect of people bailing out right before the deadline. Should be be a small penalty for withdrawal? Quote:
I'm hoping people won't do this. If they do, then a small penalty for withdrawing would be required to counter it. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Nov 1st, 2011, 8:12pm on 11/01/11 at 18:58:08, omar wrote:
I think a $10 penalty would be reasonable. In past years many people have made their decision to play or not play based on who else was signing up. Even when little money was involved there was a question of whether it would be fun to get crushed, so some people didn't sign up until after they saw people of similar rating had joined. This year the effect will be magnified because the un-fun of getting crushed could be compounded by the un-fun of losing money. It would be distressing to sign up based on other signups who later pulled out. I will sign up on the first day so as to get the $80 price. I fully intend to play, but if my circumstances change unexpectedly, I will be happy if I can get even $70 of my entry fee back. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Nov 2nd, 2011, 1:14pm on 11/01/11 at 20:12:38, Fritzlein wrote:
OK, that makes sense. I added a penalty of $10 for unregistering. Lot less chance now that someone will register without a real intent to play. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Adanac on Nov 2nd, 2011, 3:04pm Most people probably read instructions more carefully than I do but, just in case, maybe there should be a warning above a certain threshold for transferring money from PayPal into Arimaa Points. I decided to add an extra 4000 points in my account ($40) to get ready for Monday’s World Championship registration date. So I clicked on the Add Points link and then typed in 4000, failing to notice that it was asking how many US Dollars I wanted. So PayPal thought I wanted to transfer $4000 to arimaa.com (I still hadn’t clued in, though)! :-[ The problem is that my credit card expires within the next 6 months and it doesn’t allow transfers that large if your credit card is too close to the expiry date. But I got around that by choosing to transfer the money directly from my bank account. Luckily I noticed how much money it was asking for just before I pressed OK. Happy ending: I was able to transfer $40 from PayPal despite my credit card expiration date. :) So the lesson is always read instructions carefully when you’re transferring money. And maybe there should be some sort of confirmation required or bright red text box warning before someone tries to transfer more than $250 worth of Arimaa points. If someone is requesting huge amounts, the chances are that they made the same mistake that I did. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by megajester on Nov 8th, 2011, 2:56pm on 10/30/11 at 10:47:52, chessandgo wrote:
It fit! |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by chessandgo on Nov 8th, 2011, 5:19pm You'd be covered for a century of WCs Greg :p And Joel: cool! If you wish to redesign the thing I won't take it as an offense to my aestethic sense (for I don't have any) :) |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Nov 10th, 2011, 7:51pm on 11/02/11 at 15:04:34, Adanac wrote:
Wow, that was close. I've added a warning now. Thanks for the suggestion. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by 99of9 on Nov 10th, 2011, 11:38pm Since the idea of the fee is to limit the size of the pool to only the most serious contenders, I for one will for the first time not be in this year's WC. Nevertheless, I wish you all well, and hope to watch/commentate some excellent games. I hope this system will not continue in future years. Because it actively discourages participation, the player community is likely to take less ownership of the tournament. I think this is dangerous for Arimaa. I understand that the tournament got too big for Omar alone, but managing growth is a good problem, not a bad one, and in my opinion the solution is not to prevent it. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Nov 11th, 2011, 7:03pm Wow, ten people signed up! I definitely didn't expect so many. That gives me hope to be wrong on other counts as well. It's cute that we'll be able to talk about the $1000 prize pool. I wonder if any more will sign up. I doubt it, since anyone who knew about the rules but was uncertain about participating would find it cheaper on average to sign up and withdraw later rather than waiting to sign up. But maybe someone who hasn't tuned in yet will come along later and decide that $100 or $120 isn't too much to pay. Assuming (for the rest of the post) that the field stays at ten, there will be at least one and maybe two players who go three-and-out. I hope no one regrets participating for this reason. I assume everyone entered with their eyes open to the possibility. Everything new brings something old to an end: I note that none of the three players to have played in every single Arimaa World Championship (99of9, Omar, and Naveed) will be playing this year, so from now on nobody will have that distinction. The tournament will have 27, 28, or 29 wins divvying up $1001 in prize money, so each win will be worth $37.07, $35.75, or $34.52. In any case, three wins is a net gain and only two wins a net loss. The champ will have (approximately?) seven wins. It will take about nine rounds (fewer on average?) to crown a champion, shorter than the eleven rounds it has taken each of the last four years, but longer than the seven rounds when we only did double-elimination. Is the shorter length an inducement to play for those who are otherwise squeezed for time? I guess one can reason that if one does poorly it doesn't take as much time, and if one is doing well, one doesn't care how long it is taking! I would imagine that we could rustle up commentators for every single game if there are at most five games per week. Hopefully we can draw back many of the spectators who had a good time listening last year, and even set new audience records as we did last year. Indeed, we must set new audience records for the format to be any kind of objective success. If fewer people turn out to listen this year than last, I will consider my theory proved that the correct way to build the audience is to build the number of participants, as opposed to making the stakes higher. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by UruramTururam on Nov 12th, 2011, 8:03am Well, ten people! That means that there will be a number of games played even when the entry fee is quite high. :) Meanwhile: Something to think about for future years: I understand Omar's point of view to reduce the number of players in the main Championship to maintain high quality of the games. I even think that 10 players is too much, myself I would restrict the number of players to 8. But then in order to give everybody a chance a Qualification tournament should be set before the proper event. Not to duplicate it with the finals I would do as follows: * The former year Champion has a slot in finals. * Three top rated (HvH only!) players other than the former champion also get the slots in finals (the date of making the comparison should be announced in advance). Those four players are not allowed to play in the Qualification tournament. * The remaining four slots are for top four players of the Qualification Tournament. Note that if any of eligible players (including the former Champion!) does not declare to play, the emptied slot is assigned to the fifth, sixth and so on finishers of the Qualification Tournament. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Nov 12th, 2011, 9:26am on 11/12/11 at 08:03:20, UruramTururam wrote:
The floating triple elimination format scales very well, almost as rounds to lg(players). For example, if eight times as many players enter, the number of rounds goes up by just over three. In particular, if FTE with eight players takes about nine rounds, FTE with sixty-four players takes about twelve rounds. This high efficiency raises the question of why there should be a separate qualifying tournament. If we exempt four of sixty-four and have a qualifying tournament to select the other four of sixty, the qualifying tournament would have to run four rounds just for single elimination, at least five rounds not to be sudden death, and six rounds to give all would-be qualifiers the same privilege of triple elimination that the main draw has. Adding just five rounds of qualifying to nine rounds of championship makes fourteen rounds total: a longer schedule than holding a unified tournament in the first place. If we are trying minimize the work involved while keeping the whole format open to everyone, then we minimize the work by having a single, unified tournament. So what is the gain from having the extra work of a divided tournament? One "benefit" that I see is that the top four can become champion with fewer wins than in a unified tournament while everyone else needs more wins to become champion than in a unified tournament. But this benefit is equivocal in my mind; there is a fine line between letting top players skip games they are expected to win on the one hand and making the format unfair on the other hand. Another possible benefit of a divided tournament would be to clearly demarcate what Omar is willing to do from what Omar is not willing to do. He would run the main event while someone else runs the qualifier. But would we really have to make extra total work just for this purpose? We could instead have a unified FTE tournament that has a volunteer TD for the first five rounds, with Omar taking over thereafter. That would create an clear limitation of Omar's responsibilities in a more efficient way. One thing that I worry about, though, is that running a large tournament, no matter whether it is the beginning rounds of FTE, or a qualifier to select four slots for the main World Championship, or simply a just-for-fun tournament unrelated to the World Championship, will inevitably put pressure on Omar to be available to troubleshoot. Supposing, for example, that Omar were out of town and unreachable by phone for two months. Could the rest of us organize a big event during that time? |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by ocmiente on Nov 12th, 2011, 12:33pm A question about the pairing algorithm. According to the rules (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/wc/2012/rules.html), the pairing algorithm attempts to: " ... 10. Minimize the number of pairings between players whose number of losses differ by N, etc. 11. Based on a ranking of the non-eliminated players primarily by least number of losses and secondarily by seed, maximize the sum of the squares of the differences in rank among paired players with equal number of losses minus the sum of the squares of the differences in rank among paired players with different number of losses. ... " My interpretation of that is that the algorithm favors more closely matched games above giving the top seed more of an advantage in the tournament. For round 2, for instance, the players with 1 loss would be paired with each other and the players with 0 losses would be paired together. This would favor better pairings from a spectator's point of view, but the players with 0 losses would have a better chance of continuing through the tournament if they were paired against the players with the loss. i.e. if rule 10 were reversed and rule 11 was more like simply maximizing the sum of the squares of the differences in rank.. for 2013, do we want to give the higher seeded players more of an advantage by pairing them with the weakest players until the field thins out, or do we want to favor a pairing system that tends to give more equal pairings? |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Fritzlein on Nov 12th, 2011, 1:13pm on 11/12/11 at 12:33:49, ocmiente wrote:
The rules probably do not match exactly what is done in the latest code. The solution is to have aaaa explain clearly what his pairing code does, and then make the rules equal to what he said. Quote:
My bias is to limit the impact of seeding to make the tournament more fair. If the seeding has less impact, there will be less stress placed on the rating system due to less incentive to manipulate it. The downside of de-emphasizing seeding is that it becomes less likely that the best player in the world ends up as World Champion, but I'm willing to live with that disadvantage up to a point. It's not like chessandgo is having trouble winning enough titles to match his skill. :D |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by UruramTururam on Nov 14th, 2011, 4:26am on 11/12/11 at 09:26:41, Fritzlein wrote:
Well there are several pros for making sport events (including mind sports) as two-part ones with several players pre-qualified to the finals: - The finals are well-defined short events with almost all the matches played on a high level. They are more media-oriented than large events. Look at the Olympic games... - The luck is somewhat reduced. There are two factors there. First, quite-a-good player may be early paired with a few really strong guys and be defeated too early taking into account his actual strength. Second on longer run even champions may have worse days and lose a few games. Yet in fact both of these issues may be addressed by giving a few strong players byes for the early rounds. - The finals and the qualifications may use different rules. For 8-players finals it may be triple or even quadruple elimination, or two groups by four with a top four group followed by a grand final. For qualification tournaments even double elimination is enough and the time for matches may also be shortened (e.g 1 minute per move). |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by aaaa on Nov 14th, 2011, 12:23pm I have a problem with the following rule: Quote:
This is wrong as these numbers can't directly be compared with each other. It would better if everyone who has an eligible WHRE rating is always ranked above anyone who doesn't and that the same goes with respect to eligible WHR ratings. Probably not going to be an issue given the likely players, but still. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by UruramTururam on Nov 26th, 2011, 3:19am By the way it seems that the 2012 championship will be the first with no new players in - every participant played in previous events. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by aaaa on Nov 27th, 2011, 12:17pm ocmiente, the idea behind any tuple elimination tournament, floating or not, is to manifest strength differences by getting players into different loss brackets. That's why the preference should be to have as many games between players with the same number of losses as possible. Order of elimination can then be seen as roughly matching that of ascending performance, with the quality of remaining players and games reliably increasing. We want to minimize the chance of the seeding becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy as much as possible. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by froody on Dec 16th, 2011, 3:11am You know; when I first saw that the entry fee was so high, I was shocked and appalled. Now it looks like it was actually a very smart move. I consoled by telling myself that the community was awesome enough to pay for any kid to enter if they had a real chance of winning it, but couldn't afford to risk the money. I think maybe you should have put a note on the wc page saying something like: "don't worry if you can't afford it, the community will *probably* chip in to see you play, if you're an exciting player with a chance of causing an upset". But I guess any serious contenders knew this anyway. And maybe the only person in this position is hanzack. And he still might come up with the money himself. (I really hope so. If he doesn't win big on his forex, I may even chip in a bit of my own money to see him play. Anyone else tempted?). I think it is a bit sad if *anyone* that would play cannot because of the money, but of course it was necessary. And I will only be super sad if the person missing out is able to worry the top 3 players. but yeah, 2012 looks exciting, and I already look forward to a community run 2013 WC. Not sure which ideas I like best. Probably the separate qualifying tournament. I really just want to have as many high quality HvH games (with radio commentary and DEEP after game analysis) as possible. I love Omar's goal to make it fun for spectators, but I also hate to see a player being forced to make a move they don't feel comfortable with just because of time pressure. I guess in the future the 5min max per move will be way too short? But for now it's OK. I think we also need to make a sharp distinction between the different time settings. Arimaa at 30s per move is a _completely different_ type of game to Arimaa at 90s per move. Personally I look down on blitz players. I think they are impatient thrill seekers that are too lazy to study positions properly! There is also strong evidence that playing at blitz speed can make you *worse* at other speeds. I think it's very important to make kids aware of this. I apply this theory to my table tennis coaching. If I have my way I make my kids practice boring repetitive drills and serve bucketfulls of balls all day. But of course that isn't fun. If you give me the wrong kid to coach they will end up hating me and quit playing (or just avoid me). If you give me the right kid to coach they will become a champion. But I say screw the kid that can't be bothered to train properly. If you're just there to have fun, you're wasting my time! In the long term I only have fun when I'm winning against the best (or one of my students is). Winning against a weak opponent will never be fun for me. |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by Tuks on Jan 1st, 2012, 5:29pm Hanzack signed up so 11 players for the title! So how is the format in the end? triple elimination? and you are probably right froody, I like to think though that most of the skill of playing fast games (which i do all year) can be transferred over to long time controls with a couple of warm up games |
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Title: Re: 2012 World Championship format Post by omar on Jan 6th, 2012, 6:05pm on 01/01/12 at 17:29:15, Tuks wrote:
Yes, it's going to be floating triple elimination. |
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